Life on the breadline

In the last two years the number of households who live on the breadline has fallen by seven percent, but 23 percent of households have disposable income below the risk-of-poverty threshold.

This is according to new statistics in the Social Diagnosis 2005 survey, which was conducted by the independent Social Monitoring Council (RMS). The survey measures poverty in terms of income per person in a household and puts the poverty threshold at zł.595 per person per month. A family is deemed to be living in poverty if monthly income per person is less than zł.330. Five percent of Polish households are at this level and 10 percent of all households have a monthly income below zł.419.

The 2005 study interviewed 4,000 people, and the results were compared to studies done in 2003 and 2000. Between 2000 and 2005, the surveys focused in particular on how the situation changed for 1,500 of those households. From the 31 percent that lived on the breadline in 2000, half had managed to get on their feet in the last five years, but 14 percent are stuck in the same poor living conditions in all three surveys.

The smaller the town, the more people live on the brink of poverty. Fully 36 percent of households in the countryside do not have sufficient means to live by. In towns where the population rate varies from 20,000-100,000, this percentage equals 20 percent, and in cities over 500,000 citizens it is down to 11 percent. The highest rates of families on the breadline were recorded in the Warmińsko-Mazurskie voivodship (30 percent) and in the Podkarpackie region (31 percent).

More than half of the households affected by unemployment live on the breadline, whereas the figure is 18 percent for working families.