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Research on the poverty has a long tradition in Poland and especially at the Institute of Labour and Social Studies (IPiSS). Surveys concerning difficult conditions of life of families were conducted also in the period of the real socialism, giving knowledge about the conditions of the society and postulating introduction of the appropriate solutions within the existing institutional and methodological framework.
In the nineties, when perturbations on the labour market came with the construction of the market economy and its quick modernisation, the system of social security, despite its institutional maturity and relatively important scale of disbursed funds, became unable to provide allowances for all groups of people affected by the violence of transformations. At that time the poverty became a visible and widely recognised social problem. Cognitive and methodological research and analysis were conducted. They were carried out on a larger scale by three research centres: Central Statistical Office (GUS), the IPiSS and the World Bank.
The research conducted by the IPiSS in the methodological aspect put the measurements of poverty in order and recommended the use of approaches and indicators proven in practice and agreed with the GUS. They consolidated the method of providing information about the scale and depth of poverty in Poland, as well as strengthened its continuity. They also contributed to including more relevant methods of combating poverty and helping the poor in the process of social policy elaboration.
The years of research resulted in understanding and some kind of consent on the used conventions of poverty definition and measurement, despite related limitations and controversies. The awareness of limitations imposed by the adopted convention is very important. For example, the comparative studies have been using the category of the so-called relative poverty for a very long time. It is based on the definition of the threshold of poverty as a certain level of income, determined in some proportion to the average level of welfare (e.g. income or consumption per capita). The European statistics define three poverty thresholds: on the level of 40%, 50% or 60% of the average income or the median of income. The most often quoted statistics determine the poverty threshold (or the poverty line) at the level of 50% of the average income per person (or consumption unit) in a given period. In consequence, the poor from the countries on different level of development may, while having the same poverty rate, have completely different material situation. Also the analysis of the problem in time, where the poverty rate remains the same, indicates that the material situation of the poor may be significantly different. What does it mean, when the rate of relative poverty increases and the average level of income is not reduced? It simply signifies the increase of social inequalities. The majority of the poor have less than a half of average income per person. Poland in the enlarged EU belongs to the countries where the rate of relative poverty is not much higher than in the majority of the EU countries. The lowest indicator can be found in Sweden and Czech Republic (!). But if the point of reference is not our average income but the average income in the European Union, then Poland, together with the Baltic countries, is situated at the end of the list.
The criticism of relative poverty is related mainly to the fact that the poverty rate may rise or remain unchanged while the national income increases. This indicator shows then that not everybody participates proportionally in this increase. Such regularities – inflexibility of poverty in relation to the growth – occur in some periods and in some regions, although this is not a typical phenomenon. Long-term economic growth, if it is accompanied by the increase of employment, usually corresponds with the decrease of poverty. If, however, the flexibility of poverty in relation to the growth is low, as it was in Poland and some of other new EU countries on the turn of decades, it is a signal of some social difficulties, in this case occurring due to the high dynamics of transformation and decrease of employment. Lack of automatic reaction, consisting of the decrease of poverty while the economy grows, is related to the phenomenon of the so-called jobless growth, characterising the dynamic economic transformations in Poland: high work effectiveness and restructuring of industry (described more widely in the article concerning labour).
Due to the problems with interpretation of relative poverty, there are many partisans of absolute poverty measurement. For example, the specialists of the World Bank use absolute measurements, different for different world regions (USD 2,15 or 4,30 per person daily, according to the purchasing power standard). In many countries, also the official measurements of poverty use the absolute measures. In Poland, in this case, the measures based on the consumption basket (basket of the minimum of existence, social intervention threshold, or threshold of income support for families) are used.
After Poland joined the EU, the research on poverty gathered new dynamics. The European Commission and Eurostat propose to enlarge the category of poverty by social exclusion, more widely introduce panel research, unify quantitative and qualitative research and postulate the creation of new measurements indicators. Moreover, fighting against poverty and social exclusion has become one of the goals of the social policy strategy of the EU, realised jointly with member countries. The introduction of the category of social exclusion is an important fact in this new period. As a result there arises a question – is this only an external effect, related to the Union’s methodological conventions or is this a better category to explain contemporary social phenomena, also in Poland? Is it not sufficient to stand by the category of poverty, a phenomena that is understood, easy to recognise and measure?
We searched for answer to this question by enlarging and deepening the research on the conditions of life of population as well as new dimensions and areas of poverty and social exclusion within the project entitled Poverty and social exclusion and methods of combating them (Ordered research project PBZ-MIN-006/H02/2003); we present some of its results in this issue of “Polityka Społeczna”.
Let us start with demonstration of differences between the category of poverty and of social exclusion – what is facilitated by the specification below.

The Polish National Strategy for Social Integration (NSIS 2004) indicated that people threatened by social exclusion: – live in unfavourable economic conditions (material poverty);
– are affected by disadvantageous social processes occurring as a result of mass and dynamic development changes, e.g. deindustrialisation, crises, sudden fall of industries, regions;
– do not have the life capital giving them normal social position: the appropriate level of qualifications, existence on the labour market, family and make difficulties at the adaptation to the changing social and economic conditions;
– do not have access to the appropriate institutions allowing acquiring the life capital, its development and multiplication, as a result of deficiency of those institutions (educational, health protection...) due to: lack of priorities, lack of public funds, low effectiveness;
– are discriminated as a result of deficiency of the appropriate legislation as well as due to cultural prejudices and stereotypes;
– are characterised by features that make it difficult for them to use general social resources due to disability, addiction, long-term illness or other individual traits;
– are subject to destructive activity of other people: violence, blackmail, indoctrination.
On the whole, the social and political sense for the use of social exclusion category consists of stressing three issues: (1) indication of importance of other dimensions to human life than only material ones, (2) stressing the dynamics of the development and tendency of disadvantageous situations in the life of man to strengthen and (3) respecting high importance of social bonds and good relations with institutions in the evaluation of the quality of life of people and their public behaviours.
The last of the quoted issues – social bonds and access to social and political institutions – is particularly the concern and the reason to use the category of social exclusion and, what is more, to create a strategy of social inclusion (social integration). In different European countries there is a political awareness of this problem and support for creating social integration programmes. It concerns even Great Britain, the country where the tradition of research on poverty is so long that it would seem that there is no inclination to enlarge and change the approach. But it is in England where the most concrete programmes and actions for social integration are created and the contemporary research and reports on the poverty already generally use the wider category of social exclusion.
The fact that the usefulness of the social exclusion category for the research on social issues in Poland, being at the same time an expression of concern about public behaviours of fellow citizens, became obvious is indicated by, for example, the Polish debate on poverty (Conducted on the turn of 2005/2006 in “Gazeta Wyborcza”, among others).
It is not the traditionally understood poverty that constitutes the main social issue but the impoverishment of social bonds and deterioration of the quality of life in its participation dimension.
When the main reason of poverty is the lack of stable and legal job, as it is now in Poland, and the basic method of making poor families’ living is casual work, often illegal, also in form of periodical economic migration, new behaviours and social processes occur there. Some families in those conditions manage quite well from the material point of view: buy an old car to ensure mobility (public transport infrastructure often no longer exists in their locality), include children in the process of earning money, exchange goods and services. Their consumption also remains on a certain necessary level. The apartment is usually equipped with a refrigerator and a colour TV-set, children are well clothed. From the outside, the social problem could not be noticed. But the problem of those families consists of the fact that they do not participate in normal social life, and their children have minimum chances to get away from the situation in which their parents are stuck. It also concerns people who have earned their living abroad for many years. By cleaning and taking care of elder and chronically ill people in Berlin or Brussels, growing asparaguses or cucumbers in Germany or strawberries in Sweden, the migrants do not improve their human capital. Having ‘worked their fingers to the bone’ they return to a country they know less and less about and, besides going to church, do not participate in any social events. They loose contact with their children, they no longer motivate them to have some achievements at school. They do not take care of them, do not raise them. The possibilities to return or enter the market of legal employment in Poland become reduced in time.
When the social exclusion becomes the fate of the growing number of social groups (non-participation in the normal life thanks to the job, education and social activity), then the democracy becomes seriously endangered. Excluded people stop behaving like citizens: do not participate in elections, do not pay taxes, do not intervene in public affairs, and become easily manipulated by radical slogans of politicians searching for capital for their ambitions.
Furthermore: 
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CONTENTS 11-12/2006 FROM POVERTY TO SOCIAL EXCLUSION

 
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