Deconstructing European poverty measures: What relative and absolute scales measure

The movement toward evidence-based policymaking in the United States owes much to politicians and scholars like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who once said: " In policy debates everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts. " But facts do not droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, but rather are the difficult-to obtain first step in the empirical process that allows policymakers to establish social success indicators for their policies, understand the causal relationships between those policies and social outcomes, and thus more effectively carry out policies that best achieve future social successes. The United States and the European Union share the common goal of the alleviation of poverty for all their citizens. The papers presented at the Joint Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)/University of Maryland International Conference on Measuring Poverty, Income Inequality, and Social Exclusion: Lessons from Europe, demonstrate that European scholars whose business it is to establish the necessary facts to measure poverty, how it changes over time, and what policies best reduce it, share a great deal in common with their American colleagues. This is most especially the case with respect to the decisions they face in their conceptualization of poverty and in how they choose to operationalize these concepts in collecting the data necessary to measure it. The primary funder—and with rare exceptions the primary institution charged with collecting data on economic well-being for a given country—is that country's central statistical agency. Within the European Union (EU), each state's statistical agency has been increasingly asked to coordinate its micro-data gatherings along EU guidelines. The first major success of this effort is the EU-SILC (European Union—Survey of Income and Living Conditions). It offers the only current ex ante equivalent data on economic well-being in each of the 27 EU member states. In doing so, the EU-SILC provides an alternative to the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), which was previously the main source of micro data on EU countries available to the international network of scholars doing poverty research. LIS was and will continue to be valuable for capturing longer-term trends in economic wellbeing both because it provides at least limited access to difficult to obtain crosssectional country data for prior years, and because ex post, it standardizes that data for crosscountry comparative purposes. However, the EU-SILC is likely to be increasingly used both by the EU and the OECD as the source for …