Exploring the relationship between poverty depth and persistence across Europe

This article examines whether persistent income poverty increases the risk of transitioning into deep poverty across European countries. Spending a long time in poverty can deplete material and human resources and create demoralisation, thus increasing potential risk of deeper income poverty. This article seeks to explore this potential relationship. For this purpose, we analyse country-level pooled longitudinal EU-SILC data covering the years 2012–20, and several European countries with distinct socio-economic development and social welfare regimes. The results show that, although most persistent poor are immune to deep poverty risk, a non-trivial share of them transition to deeper forms of poverty in subsequent periods. This association is robust to controlling for observed heterogeneity. The results highlight the protective role of labour market participation in reducing deep poverty risk among individuals who have experienced persistent poverty in the past. Moreover, substantial variation across household types is observed, with certain groups facing a higher risk of deep poverty, particularly following episodes of persistent poverty. Overall, the findings suggest the effectiveness of anti-poverty policies across countries, with important implications for the targeting and timing of social policy interventions and variation in the effectiveness of labour market participation in protecting against (deepening) poverty. Taken together, results emphasise the importance of stable and better-paying jobs with flexible work arrangements that would also benefit households with particularly high risk of deep poverty.