Poverty Sweeps Europe, Greece Hard Hit

Nearly 120 million of Europe’s inhabitants are at risk of poverty or social exclusion, equal to about a fourth of the population of the EU-27 (24.2%) according to figures from the European Union’s statistics agency, Eurostat.

The agency figures for 2011 showed an increase over 2008 and 2009 when the numbers were 23.4% and 23.5% respective. The hardest hit were Bulgarians, who live in a country in which almost half of the population (49%) are near the poverty level, followed by Romanians and Latvians (40%) and then Lithuanians (33%). On their heels are Greeks with 31% (about 3.4 million people) of the population near poverty in 2011, compared with 28.1% in 2008. The figure in Spain was at 27% (22.9% in 2008), which translates into 12.4 million people at risk. A lower percentage (24.4%)of the Portuguese were near poverty than their Spanish counterparts, with the figure in steady decline since 2008 (when it was at 26%). In France, where the figure was lower (19.3%) than the EU average, there are in any case 11.8 million citizens on the verge of becoming poor. Eurostat has not released any figure for Italy for 2011, but in 2010 poverty affected 24.5% of the population. Croatia has been hard hit as well with 32.7% of its population near poverty in 2011, equal to about 1.4 million citizens.