Parallel Session 4D: Measuring Wellbeing II

[Draft dated 18th July 2008 – please do not quote without authors ’ consent] Abstract: The EU Council of Ministers in 1975 defined the poor as “individuals or families whose resources are so small as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life of the Member State in which they live ” (Council, 1975). This widely quoted definition leaves room for discussion about what can be considered a “minimum acceptable way of life ” in different countries. The paper explores this issue by exploiting data from a Eurobarometer survey on “Poverty and exclusion”, carried out in 2007 in all 27 EU Member States and aimed at assessing which items EU citizens consider to be necessary for people to live an “acceptable ” or “decent” standard of living in the country where they live. This survey constitutes a major breakthrough as it is the very first dataset that allows an EU comparative investigation of socially perceived necessities of life. The paper assesses the (in)variance of the structure of social needs between countries on the basis of an Individual Differences Scaling (INDSCAL) model, which is an extension of Multidimensional Scaling (MDS). It also investigates the consistency between the citizen’