Effectiveness of Policies to Fight Poverty in the EU. Evaluation Using a Fuzzy Poverty Indicator (FPI)

Abstract

This paper assesses the achievement of the poverty targets of the EU's 2020 Strategy. To this end, for the first time for all EU Member States, an alternative measure of monetary poverty is built using fuzzy set methodology, which helps to avoid some of the drawbacks of the EU's AROPE indicator. The results from the Fuzzy Poverty Indicator (FPI) reveal that the probability of a citizen being poor in the EU has increased slightly since the launch of the Strategy in just over 20 basis points. The EU is not achieving its intended aims and also shows a significant lack of coordination due to a lack of uniformity in objectives and different behavior among Member States.