How to improve our knowledge on poverty dynamics is the subject of a presentation to be given by ISER poverty expert Stephen Jenkins next month as part of an international conference on the fight against poverty and exclusion.
Stephen is one of 5 internationally-renowned experts presenting a session entitled Knowing Poverty at the Science against Poverty Conference being held in La Granja, Spain.
Speaking ahead of his talk, Stephen Jenkins said:
“In order to assess the magnitude and impact of the poverty problem in Europe, policy makers need to supplement information about how many people are poor in any given year with information about how long and how often people are poor over a period of time. The new EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) provide some information about this dimension (”poverty dynamics"), but fall short of providing a comprehensive picture
in several ways. Improvements to EU SILC’s capabilities to analyse poverty dynamics would be very useful, but also require substantial investments in data collection, and changes in
arrangements for data access and use by researchers."
The conference will host more than 200 international academic and research experts and policy makers. It is being staged as part of Spain’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union. It’s expected to be a forum for a focused debate on the role that science can play in the fight against poverty and exclusion and that a series of key recommendations will result from that debate.
Inclusion is one of three priorities identified by the Spanish Government which wants Science and Innovation to play a more active role in the promotion of social cohesion and in the fight against poverty and social exclusion.
The Ministry of Science and Innovation which is organising the event plans to use the Conference conclusions as the basis of its proposals for the political agenda of research ministers, who will meet in May.