AS MANY as 700,000 Slovaks, or 13 percent of the population, were living in or on the verge of poverty in 2011, according to an EU-SILC (Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) survey carried out by the Slovak Statistics Office and released on October 2. It defined the risk of poverty as an income of €315 a month for a one-member household.
The number of people affected increased by one percentage point year-on-year, representing an increase of 50,000 people.
“The risk [of poverty] is three times as high with the unemployed as with the economically active population,” the director of the Statistics Office’s social statistics and demography department, Ľudmila Ivančíková, told the TASR newswire, adding that the risk of poverty for the unemployed is as high as 43 percent.
Those most threatened by poverty are households with at least three children, single parents, children and youths under 17, and women. The statisticians pointed out that poverty rose among the economically active, too.
