Poverty in Portugal: Trajectories and Daily Life

According to the poverty rate measured by the National Statistics Institute, 17.2% of the people in Portugal were at risk of poverty in 2018. This figure, made up of three digits, a decimal separator and a mathematical symbol, sums up the lives of more than 1.7 million people. Without knowing who this segment of the population is or how they live from their own perspective, it will be difficult to understand the country as a whole.

This is precisely the purpose of this study by Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos, coordinated by Fernando Diogo: to understand the diversity of poverty, to get to know the trajectories of the poor population and to understand, in depth, how they live. It begins by presenting the changes in the main poverty indicators in recent years and then characterises the population in question. This characterisation is based on official data (from the Survey of Living Conditions and Income – ICOR) and then through microdata provided to us by INE under a specific protocol, from ICOR 2017 and focused on individuals aged 18 and over. These microdata were essentially processed using two statistical analysis techniques, Probit and ACM, which made it possible to identify the most relevant variables for defining profiles of individuals in poverty and, finally, to identify the four poverty profiles in Portugal portrayed in the study:

• Retired people
• Precarious workers
• The unemployed
• Workers

Through this study, FFMS seeks to highlight a reality that is often forgotten or even ignored in the country, thus fulfilling its long-standing mission of contributing to more in-depth knowledge of the country and to more informed public and political debate.