55% of Albanians have difficulty closing the month, but in Europe the Greeks surpass us

2025-10-24 07:25:13, Ekonomi CNA

55% of Albanians have difficulty closing the month, but in Europe the Greeks

When Albanians are asked “How easy is it for you to make ends meet?”, about 55% of them answer “with great difficulty” or “with difficulty.” This figure is much higher than the European Union average, where only 17.4% of Europeans feel poor.

In the region, 34% of Serbs, half of Montenegrins and almost half of Macedonians feel poor.

Eurostat also measures subjective poverty, which is a new field of study, created to complement traditional indicators of poverty, such as the risk of being poor, severe material and social deprivation, or living in a household where almost no one is employed.

This is an indicator that measures people's personal perception of their ability to meet daily expenses, as opposed to relative poverty which is measured based on income. The question on which the survey is based is: "How easy is it for you to make ends meet?"

Unlike relative poverty indicators – which are calculated based on the average income of households in a country – the subjective poverty indicator measures respondents’ own perception of the difficulty in meeting daily expenses. The assessment takes into account the material situation of the family, including income, expenses, debts and assets. Respondents have 6 options to choose from: With great difficulty; With difficulty; Some difficulty; Quite easy; Easy; Very easy. According to the Eurostat definition, households that respond “with great difficulty” or “with difficulty” are considered to be in subjective poverty.

Albanians rank second in Europe in the concept of subjective poverty. Do you know which residents think they are the poorest? They are our Greek neighbors. 67% of Greeks perceive themselves to be poor, a record in Europe.

However, Albania has a high gap between the level of monetary poverty of official measurements, which is around 20% in 2024, and the perception of residents who think they are poor, which exceeds 50%, with a difference of over 30 percentage points.

INSTAT reported earlier that in 2024, the at-risk-of-poverty indicator in Albania is 19.2%, a decrease of 0.6 percentage points, compared to the reevaluated data for 2023. The at-risk-of-poverty threshold for a person in 2024 is estimated at 324,336 Lekë, compared to 262,325 Lekë in 2023.

The perception of poverty by Albanians is closer to the poverty and social exclusion indicator, which includes 40.5% of the population, according to data recently published by INSTAT.

This means that 40.5% of the population meets at least one of these three criteria:

-They are at risk of monetary poverty – a person's income is lower than 60% of the national average.

-They have severe material or social deprivation – the person is unable to afford basic expenses such as heating, paying bills, buying food, clothes, vacations, etc.

-Live in families with very low work intensity – when adults in a family work very little or not at all during the year.

One in six citizens of the European Union perceives themselves as poor, even though they may not be so according to official income indicators. According to the latest Eurostat data, for 2024, 17.4% of the EU population reported that they were coping with “difficulty” or “very difficult”, classifying themselves as being in subjective poverty.

Among EU member states, Greece had the highest percentage of people considered subjectively poor (66.8%), followed by Bulgaria (37.4%) and Slovakia (28.7%).

At the other end of the scale, the lowest levels were recorded in the Netherlands and Germany (both at 7.3%) as well as in Luxembourg (8.5%).

17.8% of Italians feel poor, compared to 22% of Spaniards and French.

Across Europe, women feel somewhat more affected by financial difficulties (17.8%) than men (17.0%). Subjective poverty is highest among young people under 18 (20.6%) and lowest among those over 65 (14.9%).

Eurostat emphasizes that subjective poverty is a complementary measure to the "objective" one - because it measures not only income, but also the feeling of insecurity caused by prices, debts and living standards in a given country.

In 16 EU countries, the percentage of those who feel poor is greater than that of people who are actually at risk of poverty according to income./ Monitor.al