Indicator 1.41 In work at - risk - of poverty rate

The indicator is part of the EU Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) indicator set where it is used to monitor progress towards SDG 1 on ending poverty in all its forms everywhere, which is embedded in the European Commission’s Priorities under ‘An Economy that works for people’. The indicator is included as a secondary indicator in the Social Scoreboard for the European Pillar of Social Rights and EPSR Action Plan. The share of persons who are employed and have an equivalised disposable income below the risk-of-poverty threshold, which is set at 60 % of the national median equivalised disposable income (after social transfers). For the purpose of this indicator, an individual is considered as being employed if he/she was employed for more than half of the reference year. The indicator is based on the EU-SILC (statistics on income, social inclusion and living conditions).

Employment is often claimed to be the best protection against poverty, so one of the objectives of the EU is to create more and better jobs. It is therefore important to measure the share of working-poor, people living below the poverty line although they are working. Poverty and social exclusion harm individual lives and limit the opportunities for people to achieve their full potential by affecting their health and well-being and lowering educational outcomes. This, in turn, reduces opportunities to lead a successful life and further increases the risk of poverty. Without effective education, health, social, tax benefit and employment systems, the risk of poverty is passed on from one generation to the next. This causes poverty to persist and hence creates more inequality, which can lead to long-term loss of economic productivity from whole groups of society and hamper inclusive and sustainable economic growth.

The indicator is produced according to the high-level quality standards of European Statistics. From 2005 onwards, EU-SILC is based on a common framework defined by harmonised lists of primary and secondary variables, common concepts, a recommended design, common requirements (such as imputation procedures, weighting, sampling errors calculation) and classifications aiming at maximising comparability of the information produced. From 2021 Regulation (EU) 2019/1700 foresees the requirements relating to geographical coverage, detailed sample characteristics, including subsampling, in accordance with Annex III, common data gathering periods, common standards for editing and imputation, weighting, estimation and variance estimation

The long-term objective for this indicator is a value of 0