Poverty rising in Europe: International Labour Organisation

A growing number of Europeans are living in “relative poverty”, the UN labour agency said Wednesday, warning that a lack of quality jobs worldwide was threatening to undo decades of progress in poverty reduction.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) also lamented that, while poverty had declined dramatically in middle-income countries it remained “stubbornly” high in Africa and much of Asia, with nearly two-thirds of Africans still in extreme or moderate poverty.

Overall a new ILO report found that relative poverty — defined as household income below 60 per cent of the national median income — was on the rise in wealthy nations.

“In the developed world there has been... an absolute increase in poverty, notably in this continent of Europe,” ILO chief Guy Ryder told reporters.

In 2012, 22 per cent of inhabitants in developed countries — a full 300 million people — were living in relative poverty, with more than one third of all children in these wealthy nations considered poor, ILO’s 2016 World Employment Social Outlook Report found.

The situation was particularly dramatic in the European Union, which had seen its relative poverty level remain stable at around 16.5 per cent for a number of years leading up to the 2008 global financial crisis.

But in 2012, relative poverty in the bloc swelled to 16.8 per cent and by 2014 it had hit 17.2 per cent, the report said.

The United States also saw its relative poverty rate shoot up by nearly a percentage point from 23.8 per cent in 2005 to 24.6 per cent in 2012, but it had remained stable since then, the statistics showed.