Marta Pascual-Saez, David Contarero-Prieto, Paloma Lanza-Léon (p)

Kateryna Tkach

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the Europe 2020 Strategy approved by the European Union in June 2010, in particular, the target that by 2020 there should be at least 1.4 million fewer poor people in Spain, is not being achieved. On the contrary, social exclusion and vulnerability increase as the number of reported confirmed COVID-19 cases continues to rise.
In this scenario, the present study is meant to analyze the risk for vulnerability to social exclusion. More specifically, this article investigates the severe deprivations that people face before the health and economic crisis derived from the pandemic in the different Spanish regions. To do so, the last available wave (2019) from the Spanish Living Conditions Survey is used. It is necessary to highlight that social exclusion covers several items. Therefore, in this paper, six deprivation domains have been distinguished to examine the vulnerability to social exclusion: economic, housing, environment, education, labour, and health. For this purpose, households and adults who suffer from lack in any of the domains mentioned have been considered. In terms of methodology, the multidimensional statistical technique of Factor Analysis is considered, and the sum-score approach is used to construct the social exclusion index.
The results revealed that there was a population group who presented a large number of vulnerability factors and, therefore, these individuals had greater risk of social exclusion. When comparing social exclusion severity distinguishing between geographic areas, the findings corroborate that regions from the South of Spain present worse outcomes - higher risk for vulnerability to social exclusion -. In addition, more than 40% of individuals in these regions are in social exclusion. Looking at the Northeastern Spain, less than 20% of individuals are living in social exclusion – lower risk for vulnerability -.
In this context, policy makers need to design and establish social public policies focused on reducing social exclusion in terms of economic, housing, environment, labor, education, and health fields, especially, now, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Alessandra Faggian, Alessandra Michelangi, Kateryna Tkach (p)

Paloma Lanza-León

Is actual inequality accurately translated into people’s perceptions, and what are the genuine hopes of citizens? Our contribution offers insights into how the reality and two subjective dimensions of inequality, namely perceptions, and desires, interact. Using data from the Eurobarometer, we study the main patterns of different “types” of inequality in the European NUTS2 regions. Considering the role of attitudes and beliefs, the residents of the same region are typically found to hold a similar perception of how unequal their society is. Moreover, and somewhat surprisingly, the reality is contrary to people’s perception since low (high) actual inequality in the region is often reflected in its overestimated (underestimated) perception. We also show that perceived, and desired inequality are distinct metrics as commonly applied determinants of perceptions are rather weakly associated with desired inequality, probably due to the normative nature of the latter. The evidence presented here implies that objective measures of inequality should be used in conjunction with subjective ones to gain a complete picture of the phenomenon. Our findings may assist policy-makers and other interested stakeholders in designing dedicated policies to counteract inequality in all its forms.