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Hernández Peña, D. “Regional risk of poverty in the EU-27”, Blogpost, Jacques Delors Institute, October 2024

The European integration project that gave birth to today’s European Union (EU) was designed to bring peace and prosperity to a war-torn continent, at a time when European leaders were moving closer together. It seems to have done so, as most European citizens now enjoy a relatively affluent lifestyle. However, more than 70 million EU inhabitants were still at risk of falling into poverty in 2022, posing a serious threat to social cohesion and the survival of the common project.

What is more, these people were not evenly distributed across the Union, but were overrepresented in certain areas, indicating the existence of patterns of disadvantage and inequality over specific territories. As a result, vulnerability to poverty, although being ubiquitous, is also a spatially heterogeneous phenomenon that varies profoundly from place to place (Copus et al. 2015).