The European Union’s new strategy, Europe 2020, offers an integrated and innovative response to the economic and social challenges that the economic crisis has highlighted or worsened. Proposed and adopted during the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion, Europe 2020 places the reduction of poverty and exclusion as one of the Union’s priorities and defines a quantitative aim to be reached before the end of the decade. To support this commitment and make it credible, the European Commission has proposed a flagship initiative, the European Platform to Combat Poverty and Social Exclusion, one of whose tasks will be to appeal to social innovation to find adequate responses to social risks old and new. only subscribers can see the full article

Although the right to a house is widely recognized, even today many people in numerous European countries experience conditions of housing deficit, which can create and determine conditions of real social exclusion. This study analyses the particular language of the narratives of a group of interviewees to identify the factors that resist or propel the transition processes from conditions of vulnerability to situations of social exclusion. The analysis identifies terms that are emblematic of the breaking points in the life histories, with particular reference to some fundamental topics (housing, family, work, participation in protest movements).only subscribers can see the full article

The article analyses the phenomenon of social exclusion in Europe through the indicators proposed by the European Commission, included in the Portfolio of Indicators for the Monitoring of the European Strategy for Social Protection and Social Inclusion - 2009 Update. These indicators guarantee the comparability of statistics, as they also derive from matching harmonized surveys at European level. The indicators were analysed first separately, to bring out the characteristics of the various countries in relation to the problem, and then these were combined in homogeneous groups to bring out homogeneousness and lack of homogeneousness among the countries of the Eu-27. only subscribers can see the full article

Each year the Commission on social exclusion presents a «Poverty Report» which illustrates, through a series of indicators and analyses, the main features of poverty in Italy and the policies which have been implemented to contrast it in the previous year. Most of the data presented initially seem to be easily interpreted but it is not always the case: in the construction of some indicators, there may be some hidden conceptual traps which can be misleading and offer a distorted vision of the reality. Without a «preventative» clarification of what is really meant by poverty, you run the risk of misinterpreting the real condition of poor families and the most appropriate policy measures needed to improve their standard of living. It is thus necessary to clear up any possible confusions to prevent any policy mystification from causing policy errors.only subscribers can see the full article

The European Council has recently adopted «Europe 2020», the ambitious strategy for «smart, sustainable, inclusive growth» that will direct the action of the community and member countries in the fields of economic, employment, environmental and social policies over the next decade. Quantitative targets – five in all – play a fundamental role in it, and countries must commit themselves to reaching them by 2020 through concrete policy actions. One of the five targets concerns an indicator of poverty and social exclusion, and is fixed in absolute terms: 20 million people outside the poverty area in ten years. It is the conclusion of a long journey begun in Lisbon in 2000, when in the new community coordination of social policies, the indicators were at once considered fundamental ingredients of the process, the aim being to make the outcomes of the interventions more transparent and to compare more easily government action in the different countries and the time taken. The article recalls the fundamental stages in this journey.only subscribers can see the full article