DETERMINANTS OF PERSISTENT POVERTY IN THE EU COUNTRIES

Although the significant progress is met across different components of society, poverty still remains an issue in the political and academic debates. Moreover, persistent poverty represents a thorough reality of the societies, being caused by complex interactions between economic, social and environmental factors. In this context, our paper intends to analyze the relationships between persistent poverty, on one hand, and the national patterns in terms of resources productivity and domestic material consumption, of agricultural size of holdings, of tertiary educational attainment and, also, of social protection, on the other hand, across the European Union member states in 2018. Our results showed that persistent poverty is significantly influenced by all the above indicators, excepting educational attainment. In detail, an increasing number of small farms in terms of worked land (2 ha) determines a higher level of persistent poverty. Contrary, resources productivity and domestic material consumption and, also, expenditure of social protection represent determining factors that influence persistent poverty in a negative manner. In other words, their increasing represents ways of poverty amelioration. Focusing on the analysis of a critical phenomenon, affecting a significant part of European population, we consider that our study responds to a real need for research in this field.