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future . [4]. D Fellegi 2010 Examination and proposals in the topic of the state support of the energy poverty and
the alleviation of poverty, the legitimacy of the welfare state, tax progression, and income redistribution. In the field of social policy, however, less attention has been paid to public perceptions of poverty, notwithstanding that over a hundred
Poverty in Hungary
Using the Concept of the Proportional Deprivation Index
The author summarizes the results of employing a new method, the proportional deprivation index (PDI). The novelty of the approach is the weighting of deficits in specific dimensions. The PDI takes two things into account: the lack of living condition components owing to scarcity of resources and the importance people attach to the lack of these items. According to the author's opinion the central components of this new concepts may play a part in the empirical analysis of the problem of exclusion vs. integration. On the basis of the comparison of deprivation and income poverty and the analysis of these according to various socio-economic factors the author concludes that the investigations based on disparate concepts have led to very similar results. However, certain dissimilarities are also observable, thus the simultaneous application of the concepts may/will provide a more differentiated and nuanced understanding of poverty and disadvantage.
The research basis is provided by the project Povetry, Ethnicity, Gender in Transitional Societies implemented under the leadership of Professor Iván Szeláényi in six countries of he former Eastern block in 1999-2000. The data have confirmed the initial assumption of the study: new poverty is being born, which is not an element of the life cycle of the individual but rather a socio-economic dependence affecting entire groups of people. The socio-biological factors (age, gender, children) are not pushed away but are rather transformed by the new dominant. The new socio-economic context even reinforces their effect, especially in osme countries. A new, unexpected phenomenon is the formation of an age underclass in Southeast and Russia. All the countriessurveyed, except for Poland, exhibit symptoms of poverty feminization. The number of children in a family is a primordial factor bearing on the family budget. However, the stringest dependence is ethnicity-based. The poverty of Roma in Southeast Europe is catastrophic and separates them into an ethnic underclass. Roma people in Hungary are losers as well but their poverty has a different macro-economic backdrop. The differentia specifica of the research topic itself: it is not a static situation but a process in which reason and effect change places, a process that both shapes and is affected by the social structure. In parallel to the liberalization of economic initiative, powerful destructive processes are under way tear the old social connections apart and turn the social atatus of immense groups of people upside down. the former middle layers are layered further. The income below avarage is the common denominator for many of them (in Central Europe) or for the majority (southeast Europe and Russia), in contrast to the avarage income before. It could be foreseen that povetry will be irreversible for many and would entail declassation. This is already a fact for ethnic minorites in Southeast Europe and for elderly people there and in Russia. The further dynamics of the process could be traced at a new stage of the study.
The authors investigated the poverty of children by means of a sample covering only the poorest third of the population. Their starting point was that children have special needs that differ from those of adults, and that the degree of satisfaction of those needs determines to a large extent the quality of their life and their future life chances. The results show that within the poor population the children in the most disadvantaged situation are those who live in Budapest, who live in families without an active earner, and the children on of the Roma. The difference between the poverty of children living in the capital and in villages is significant despite the fact that on the national level the income level of the capital is higher than in the villages. Two factors that were expected to be significantly influencing need satisfaction, namely the age of the children and the number of children in the household do not seem to differentiate significantly the poor population. The majority of poor households with children get some social benefits but the level of the benefits is too low to significantly improve the situation.
Aassve, A. - Iacovou, M. - Mencarini, L. (2006): Youth Poverty and Transition to Adulthood in Europe. Demographic Research 15(2): 21–50. Mencarini L
Part One of this study summarizes the general view of poverty since the political regime changed, and the practical consequences. The previous regime's denial and hiding of the poverty issue has had several effects. One is that poverty is considered foreign to the system, simply the fallout of economic crisis, and therefore transitional. The belief in its transitional nature has covered up the difference between mass impoverishment and lasting poverty, which always existed, is becoming increasingly serious, and can easily escalate into permanent exclusion. The need to dismantle an overcentralized state is a major reason why the poverty problem has not been understood. Public expenditure can be reduced with little resistance if only those 'who really need it' are assisted. This policy suggests that poverty is 'accidental' and individualized, and that the victims can be blamed. Another, more practical consequence has been the segregating effect of separate institutional poverty management. Institutional reforms have created a huge network of nature of poverty has thus been hidden under the guise of individualization as well as by transferring management to small communities. At the same time, these measures have anchored lines of demarcation between mainstream society and the poor. Part Two of the study focuses on the internal stratification of the poor. The result of impoverishment is that there is now a mass of income-poor people (retirees, low-income families, parents of young children), whose problems are 'only' ones of distribution. Since their bonds to mainstream society have not been fatally injured, their situation could be resolved with money and economic expansion. The other group of the poor is the long-standing, extremely poor. They are in a consolidated state of poverty from which escape is almost impossible. As individuals, people without families, or whose families are in a state of collapse, are in particularly dire situations. Others, who are unskilled and come from less competitive strata and have been driven off the increasingly limited labor market to lock themselves into the underground economy, are in a similarly ominous position. There are also two groups that are collectively poor. It is almost impossible to break out of tiny pockets of isolated settlements and of regions particularly depressed by mass unemployment. The other collective is made up of the victims of the dead-end of forced assimilation, primarily the Roma poor which make up 60-80 per cent of the Gypsy population.
The paper analyses multi-dimensional poverty also called exclusion with the help of a large national sample. The paper shows the long-term trends covering three decades of increasing income inequalities, the decade-long decrease and slow upturn of personal incomes, and the changes in various poverty measures. The second part offers an approach to multiple deprivation or exclusion as the simultaneous presence of various aspects of objective and subjective poverty, and gives an account of the situation of the families that may be considered excluded. The third part analyzes the dynamics of poverty as a lifetime and as a shorter-term experience, and also the future expectations of the poor. The conclusion is that there is a small and not very visible group split off the 'first society' that, without public help is condemned to lasting exclusion.
The purpose of this analysis is to shed light on distribution of poverty within the social structure. Using comparable national survey data from Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Hungary we determine to what extent social determinants of poverty observed in the capitalist West are also at work in the specific context of East European societies. Second area of inquiry, here, concerns the formation of the uinderclass. In searching for a post-communist underclass this analysis attemps to figure out the social location of the poor relative to positions occupied by intelligentsia, other non-manual categories, working class, peasants, and owners. The districtive characteistics of the Western underclass are labor market detachment, social isolatio, and material seprivation. Using discrimination analysis we examine the placement of the poor within the social structure relative to ovvupationally based class categories. This analysis shows that in multidimensional space as defined in terms of social origin, educational achievements, housing conditions, material possessions, and ethnicity there is no significant differences between the poor and ocupationally-based class categories in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland. contrariwise, significant distinctions of this kind appear in Romania, Slovakia and Russia. In interpretation of these findings we seek to answer the question whether after decade of political and economic transformations, unique features of poverty in Eastern Europe tend to intermingle with universal patterns.
The results of our empirical researches carried out in North-East Hungarian region is analyzed and compared with national and international experiences. During last decade, we examined social and health status of Gipsy/Roma people living in this region in frame of researches, two of them were proceed at county, others at settlement level. We present our results grouped around three problems, which gives a chance for empirical testing of hypothesis of other researches reflected on this problems. Typical sample’s characteristics of Hajdúböszörmény study made feasible to analyze the statements on correlation between underclass situation and ethnicity. Our results proved the statement that the poverty makes ethnical feature but not only Roma can be ranked among underclassed. In our study we deeply analyze coherence of ethnicity and poverty; besides of income poverty we touch the housing poverty, deprivation in wealth and living conditions, and the problems of social-political poverty. The health state was studied through the subjective health picture, utilization of the health care system, satisfaction with care services and the list of most frequently complaints, diseases.We aspired in our study to give structural and cultural explanation of examined phenomenon, moreover to present correlations, although because of research methods we rather analyzed successes of structural effects.
