Poverty and inequality in Europe

Ester Boserup published a book in 1970 with the title Women’s Role in Economic Development. Her analysis of the relevance of women’s work within various economic domains turned the then common wisdom of development aid and development thinking upside down: women are not just passive beneficiaries of economic growth created by their men-folk, she argued. Women are active agents of national economies whose roles – from the household to agriculture and industry – are unjustifiably ignored. National economies would never be what they are without women’s (regularly unpaid) participation, and thus their participation has to be recognized and valued. Women need to be seen on the same footing as men when development policies are designed, and need training, education, technology – all the investments that men get. In short, women need to be integrated into national economies, and all the (legal and cultural) barriers to their integration need to be removed.

Speaking to liberal economists using the language of liberal economics, Boserup’s arguments were quickly taken up by the World Bank and national governments across the world and the doors to the formal economy and labour markets started to open much more widely for women. Development projects specifically targeting women with the aim to ease their entry into the market and secure ‘income generation’ as well as labour participation picked up speed. The United Nations declared a Decade for Women (1975–1985) to offer recognition of women’s contribution to development, and support their struggle for equality and opportunity. But warnings were issued as soon as this optimism about women’s inclusion sparked images of smiling women working in factories, sitting in university classrooms, proudly standing in the midst of sprouting crops: equal integration into an economy that is essentially, structurally unjust and unequal would simply not produce good results for women. And, by the end of the 1970s, the term ‘feminization of poverty’ brought to feminist home a hard fact: compared to men, during the decade when women were given all those new, exciting opportunities to participate in national economies, they were systematically worse off than men.

The late 1970s and the 1980s also saw Structural Adjustment Programmes and loans strangulating many national economies in the South (and that without even talking about neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism), while privatization of industries and of public and social services created ever deeper cracks between the haves and have-nots. Again, not surprisingly, a number of feminists pointed out that, with all of those measures, the poorest and most excluded women would carry the heaviest gender specific burden: when the local hospital is privatized, child-care services are non-existent and when public transport is unaffordable, having an ‘opportunity’ to sell one’s labour or one’s products on the exploitative national and global markets does not free the working mother from having to care for sick family members; but it might push her daughter to step in to babysit younger siblings, because the school is too far anyway and the bus fare too expensive and thus given to the son.

As the effects of neoliberal economic globalization became an ever more important political and theoretical issue with the new millennium, economists strived to show that the economic growth that a number of countries across the globe experienced in the 1980s and 1990s had led to a decrease in global poverty rates by the early 2000s (Fosu, 2010). But they also noted that many of these countries have seen a rise in inequalities. Thus, while the increasing wealth of the few has pushed national statistics on poverty down, poverty has remained stubbornly present and often increasing, with the increase of inequalities (Fosu, 2010). In addition, while the relative global income inequality index between countries went down slightly from the mid-1970s to 2010 (because of the economic growth of countries such as China and India), the absolute inequality index within the countries has shown a dramatic rise (Niño-Zarazúa et al., 2017).

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So where does Europe stand amidst all those trends, and who are the people in Europe worst affected by them? The research conducted by Niño-Zarazúa et al. shows that Europe and Central Asia are among the few regions where both relative and absolute rates of inequality have gone up in the last four decades. ¹ And many a research study also shows that poverty has risen across Europe too. Not in every country, and not for every segment of the population, but nevertheless, the poverty and inequalities in the European Union’s 28 countries are growing, and are – apparently – there to stay. ²

The European Anti-Poverty Network’s report ‘Poverty and Inequality in Europe’ shows that in 2005 16% of the EU population was at-risk of poverty. Children’s rate of poverty was 19%, while single parent (read: single mother) risk of poverty was 33%! The text notes that ‘these figures do not include some of those in the most extreme situations such as some minority ethnic groups, especially the Roma, immigrants, undocumented migrants, the homeless, people living in or leaving institutions, etc.’.

Children, women (especially single mothers), migrants (including documented and undocumented migrants) and asylum seekers and refugees are consistently mentioned in almost every report about poverty in Europe in the last decade. For example, Eurostat data show that the number of people at risk of poverty and social exclusion has been on the rise since 2008, with ‘children, young people, people living in single parent households, those with less education, and migrants’ facing the highest risk. By 2014, 24.4% of European population were in the risk-of-poverty category. The same report notes that in 20 out of 28 countries in 2015 children were at higher risk of poverty than adults – 26.9%. The elderly faced lower risks of poverty than the general population, unless they lived in rural areas. The European rural population, especially those in Eastern Europe, face higher levels of poverty than urban dwellers. An FAO document on poverty in Europe notes that around 43 million people face ‘food poverty’ – and considering that Europe has around 710 to 740 million people (depending on who is counted), taking the latter figure means 5.8% of the population go hungry in Europe, dependent on food aid. The biggest category of food aid recipients are ‘families in difficulties, the elderly, the homeless, the disabled and asylum seekers’. According to the European Parliament, the ‘working poor’ are an important category of poor (declared the ‘new poor’ more than a decade ago): people in temporary, precarious and seasonal jobs, and those who earn wages too low to sustain them even with full-time jobs. Besides – and amongst – the working poor, the highest risk is again faced by (single parenting) women, children and migrants. The Caritas Crisis Report 2015 explicitly states that poverty in Europe is on the rise, noting that in Bulgaria and Romania almost half of the population is poor, and adding that ‘In fourteen out of the EU’s 28 member states, one in three children are considered to be living in poverty’. According to Euronews, in Bulgaria this figure increases to more than half of all children.

Orsolya Lelkes and Eszter Zólyomi (2011: 5–6) show that between 2004 and 2007 the migrant ‘at-risk-of-poverty rate is as high as 40% or more in Belgium, Luxembourg and Finland and also reaches 30% in Denmark, Greece, Spain, Cyprus, Latvia and Sweden. Overall the at-risk-of-poverty rate of non-EU migrants exceeds 30% in 9 out of 25 countries, while it is between 20% and 30% in another nine countries.’ The poorer the host country, the higher migrants’ poverty. The Caritas Report noted that in 2006 asylum seekers and undocumented migrants were among the most vulnerable populations in Europe when it came to poverty. This is still especially so for the non-European migrants. In 2015, almost half of the non-Europe born population was at risk of poverty, with hardly any difference between adult men and women. Migrant children’s poverty was 37.4%, double that of native-born children. The same report notes that having paid work does not lift many migrants out of poverty, and that non-European, male, working migrants are especially vulnerable.

When it comes to women, the European Social Watch Report 2010 lists a number of causes of female poverty, among which are unemployment, patterns of employment and type of work, discrimination at the workplace, absence of maternity protection, privatization of social services that burden women with unpaid reproductive labour, as well as women’s belonging to migrant communities and/or ethnic minorities. Migrant women are mentioned as ‘increasingly providing the infrastructure that enables higher numbers of native-born women to enter paid employment. However, the unregulated, insecure, and privatised nature of many migrant women’s work – as cleaners, housekeepers, hotel and tourism staff – leaves migrant women open to abuse and exploitation.’ The European Women’s Lobby data also show similar patterns: in 2015, almost one-third of women in the EU-28 were living in poverty and experienced social exclusion; older women are poorer than older men due to the huge gender gap in amounts of pension; single parents (who are overwhelmingly women), as well as ‘migrant women, many of whom work in the informal economy, and Roma women, many living in conditions of severe housing deprivation, are particularly at risk of poverty’. And the personal remains political: more than a third of women who are divorced, separated or widowed face poverty, compared with 11% of men in the same situations.

These data offer a dire picture of Europe: its native citizens sliding into unprecedented poverty – with almost 20% of its children and 33% of its single mothers living in poverty!!! – and those who came to Europe with hopes for a better life facing a much worse situation.

And it is not because there is no wealth in Europe.

According to a 2014 Reuters report of research by a Swiss bank, ‘Private wealth across Europe reached an all-time high of 56 trillion euros … and is set to rise by a further 40 percent to almost 80 trillion by 2019’. The Business Insider noted that in 2016, ‘the wealthiest 10% of households own 51.2% of total net wealth; at the bottom, about 5% of households have negative net wealth, i.e. the value of their liabilities exceeds the value of their assets’. This means that inequalities have risen across the board in Europe. According to the Business Insider, in the UK the top 1% of the population has tripled its wealth. The OECD 2017 report also notes the rise of inequalities in the last few decades in Europe, where 40% of the poorest households own just little over 3% of wealth, with women, young people and migrants being the poorest.

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When the countries of the South complained that Structural Adjustment Programmes were devastating national economies and a vast majority of the population, they were given more liberalization, more privatization and more inclusion into the ‘free market’ as a remedy. And as they followed instructions, inequalities within their borders grew. They diligently prepared Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, but the poor there seemed to be only poorer, and the rich richer.

Is Europe on the same course? For sure, contemporary European poverty and inequality are the results of different sociopolitical and economic histories than those in the South. Without going too far back in history, we can pinpoint a few causes: since the 1980s, Thatcherism and its ideology of liberal capitalism have brought about the steady disappearance of the welfare state model across Western Europe, erasing, first and foremost, the legacies of struggles for labour rights and protection, and privatizing social and public services. Add to that debt levels in South European countries, as well as economic problems in many former East European countries brought about, from the 1990s onward, by the entry of rather brutal versions of capitalism into the (already unsustainable) former centralized economies after the breakup of the socialist bloc. Cruel austerity measures introduced after the 2008 economic crisis in many European countries have added the last nails in the coffin of what once was the ideal of a European state: one that upheld the promise (if not always the reality) of providing for citizens’ basic needs and rights.

So, in many ways, the vast majority of European citizens and especially those whom Europe does not want as citizens, have faced in the new millennium the echoes of realities that many across the globe have faced decades earlier. Countless women, men and children at the margins of European societies have become surplus population whose lives are utterly inconsequential to the production of European wealth. And at the same time absolutely crucial – because without them all the self-congratulatory rhetoric of governments and corporate investments into creating new jobs, building new housing, organizing health services, improving infrastructure, defending borders and protecting ‘our way of life’ would make no sense whatsoever. All the rabid rhetoric of politicians about ‘criminal elements’ who ‘abuse’ and ‘deplete’ social services meant for the ‘honest working men and women’, who steal ‘our jobs’ and ‘rape our women’, would fall into empty spaces where there are no Black unwed teenage mothers in the UK, Polish plumbers in the Netherlands, or undocumented Muslim migrants in Cologne.

If these millions of women, men and children are needed to keep the optimism of neoliberal economic narratives rolling, what should be the task of feminist scholars, and especially feminist (political) economists, in Europe? Maybe not any longer to simply document the devastating effects of economic globalization on women – the above wealth of data proves that mainstream institutions are doing it quite well. Rather, we should engage much more in analysing how notions and practices of gender, race, class, sexuality and citizenship are utilized in producing and sustaining neoliberal economic globalization; how ideas of Europe and Europeanness contribute to those notions and practices; and how concepts of justice and equality function in the unjust and unequal global world of liberal economy, of which Europe is a sorry part. And finally: what can be done about it? What solidarities are needed to turn back the clock?