The rate of “material and social deprivation”, an alternative way of measuring poverty, reached 14% of the population of metropolitan France at the start of 2022, its highest level since the creation of this indicator in 2013, announced Thursday the Insee. This rate reached 13.4% in 2020, and 12.4% in 2013, said the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies. The increase in the deprivation rate is due in particular to the increase in energy prices: 10.2% of households declare that they cannot heat their homes sufficiently, compared to 6.1% in 2021 and 5% in 2018. INSEE sees in this in particular the impact of the increase in the price of domestic fuel oil, “heating fuel that vulnerable households use more than others”.
Unlike monetary poverty rates, which are based on household income, the deprivation rate is based on households giving up certain products or services, such as owning two pairs of shoes, heating properly, eating meat or fish every other day, or going on vacation for a week each year. If a household accumulates at least five of these renunciations from a list of 13 elements “considered as desirable, even necessary, to have an acceptable standard of living”, it is in a situation of “material and social deprivation”, or in other words “poor in living conditions”.
The deprivation rate depends a lot on the composition of households, observes INSEE: it reaches 6.8% among childless couples, 15.8% among single people but 31.1% among single-parent families. These figures come from the “Statistics on resources and living conditions” survey, for which INSEE questioned more than 17,000 households, i.e. nearly 39,000 people.
France is “close to the European average”, with the deprivation rate in EU countries reaching 12.7% – but 11.5% in Germany, 9% in Italy and less than 5% in Luxembourg, Scandinavia and some eastern countries. The monetary poverty rate, for its part, expresses the share of households whose standard of living is less than 60% of the median living income. This rate reached 14.6% of the population in 2020, according to INSEE.