“We are facing an enormous potential social hecatomb. Nearly 40% of citizens are at risk of falling below the poverty line“, declared this Sunday Maxime Prévot, president of the Engaged, on the set of It’s not every day on Sunday, relaying an analysis by Bruno Colmant.
But for the economist Philippe Defeyt, this observation simply does not hold water. “From a scientific and methodological point of view, this is totally false.“, he begins. “The poverty line is defined by income, not by need or the cost of living. However, the energy crisis will not change the distribution of income. So to say that it will increase the percentage of people below the poverty line is absurd.“, details our interlocutor, who recognizes that another phenomenon will be at work. “Part of the population will become impoverished, but this will not increase the rate of people below the poverty line: this is not linked to the standard of living or purchasing power.“
Differences up to 500 euros
To illustrate this difference between income and purchasing power, the economist uses a simple example. “Take a person with a low income, but who benefits from social housing and the social tariff for energy. Compare it with a person who has a slightly higher income, but who has to pay standard rent and pay their energy bills without the social tariff. Despite a lower income, the first person will have a higher purchasing power, with differences that can go up to 500 euros in the most extreme cases.”
Philippe Defeyt therefore pleads for a modification of the criteria taken into account for the calculation. “We must work with indicators linked to the standard of living to be closer to reality. The situation we are experiencing at the moment will perhaps change the debate on this subject, and make it possible to change the indicators that are used to define the poverty line.
As part of a analysis carried out for the Institute for Sustainable Development, published at the end of last August, the economist was already drawing similar conclusions. He then concluded that “choosing, to measure poverty, an indicator of income redistribution (which is the case today) amounts to ignoring the different experiences (social housing or not, gas or oil heating…), confusing ‘income ‘ and ‘standard of living’ (however the same income does not provide the same standard of living), make believe that one can respond in the same way to different situations and prefer ease to complexity. [Tout ceci] therefore leads to hiding the great inequalities at the bottom of the income scale”.
