As many as five million people in Italy live in absolute poverty, which is the record-high number since 2005, Maurizio Franzini, the acting chief of the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat), said on Tuesday.
ROME (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 09th October, 2018) As many as five million people in Italy live in absolute poverty, which is the record-high number since 2005, Maurizio Franzini, the acting chief of the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat), said on Tuesday.
The official Italian statistics differentiate between absolute and relative poverty. Absolute poverty means a situation when a person cannot afford basic goods and services, while relative poverty implies that household income is below a certain median income.
According to Istat, nearly 1.8 million Italian families live in absolute poverty, which accounts for 8.4 percent of the total population.
A total of 1.6 million people suffering from absolute poverty are foreigners, the data showed. It is almost one-third of all foreigners living in the country.
As for relative poverty, the number of people living in such conditions exceeds 8 million.
Italy was hard-hit by the 2007-11 economic crisis. According to Eurostat, the Italian public debt amounted to 116 percent of GDP in 2010, which was the second EU biggest debt after Greece and forced the government to undertake austerity measures in 2011.
In late September 2018, the Italian government, elected in March, agreed to set the gross domestic product deficit at 2.4 percent for 2019. This move caused concern among the eurozone financial ministers claiming that such a budget plan would result in an economic slowdown and public debt increase.
