the value of the “double penalty” of poverty | EUROtoday

Housing, vitality, transport, residence insurance coverage, credit score: all this stuff of family expenditure are affected by the phenomenon of “double poverty”, however this isn’t inevitable. This is the conclusion of the research revealed Thursday 1^er February The Postal Bank and the Action Tank Enterprise and Poverty affiliation, to take inventory of the phenomenon but in addition to point out the necessity to enhance the variety of assist mechanisms, each private and non-private, to mitigate its results.

The double penalty of poverty, recognized within the Sixties, significantly within the United States and the United Kingdom, refers to the truth that the poorest households, past having decrease buying energy, are sometimes penalized by the necessity to pay extra for sure items or providers than the remainder of the inhabitants.

At the origin of this phenomenon are round twenty well-identified components, together with quantity results when buying in smaller portions will increase the general invoice, exclusion when the chance profile and lack of money stream restrict entry to sure high quality items or providers, or ignorance and placement.

There is not any scarcity of examples, from older automobiles whose working prices enhance over time to financial institution charges charged on an overdrawn account, together with insurance coverage “surcharges” noticed in sure municipalities, and even in sure household configurations.

“Inflation that only affects the poor”

In 2023, exhibits the research carried out in partnership with the Boston Consulting Group, this double penalty represented an extra expenditure of 700 euros on common for the poorest French households: 745 euros for these within the first decile (the ten% of the inhabitants receiving the bottom incomes) and 640 euros for these within the second decile. Amounts which correspond respectively to 12 and eight weeks of meals purchases.

The double penalty “is an insidious phenomenon”, explains Jacques Berger, director of the Action Tank Enterprise and Poverty: “For a large minority of households in the first decile, this can represent 10% of their resources. It is in a way a specific inflation which only affects the poor. » This inflation contributes both to the deterioration of living conditions and to the reduction of the “remainder to live”, the residual buying energy as soon as the constrained bills have been assumed.

For 20% of affected households, the double penalty represents greater than 1,000 euros per yr, and among the many most affected profiles are college students, beneficiaries of minimal social advantages and other people with disabilities, but in addition working farmers, households within the means of changing into property house owners dwelling in small, poorly insulated properties.

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