Methodology and reality of poverty: Czech Republic in the European context

The economics of poverty has still not been thoroughly researched in the Czech Republic, although it is a highly relevant topic. Similarly, the international comparability of poverty indicators remains rather unexplained in the European context. First, we intend to revise the currently most common income-based measure of poverty – at-risk-of poverty rate – by developing a country-specific equivalence scale used for its construction. Second, these estimations will be extended to provide poverty measures that account not only for differences among households but also for within-household inequality. Third, subjective poverty will be analysed and a methodology of measuring subjective income poverty line derived. Fourth, the explanatory power of the indicator of material deprivation will be verified. The transferability of established methodologies will be tested and extended to the European context. The work will piece together the missing and known knowledge about the Czech economics of poverty.

The work on the project resulted in a dozen of publications, from which seven papers were published in journals with impact factor and two in other peer-reviewed journals. Most of the final results are presented in a monograph Measuring income poverty in the EU: Visegrád countries and European empirical data.