9,3 million poor people in France: inequalities increased in 2018 (RT)

The poverty rate in France increased in 2018. This statistical index, which mainly measures inequalities, was redirected upwards by the government's tax policy, which favored the richest.

In 2018, the poverty rate increased in France by 0,6 points compared to the previous year to reach 14,7% of the population, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee).

In its latest delivery, the public body explains that this increase is partly linked to the drop in housing allowances in the HLM park. However, he specifies that his indicator, by definition, cannot take into account the rent reductions imposed on social landlords, which are supposed to compensate for this drop in income. INSEE adds that the increase in the poverty rate would only be 0,2 points if it had not taken into account the reduction in benefits.

The poverty rate does not measure purchasing power that would take income and expenditure into account. It only indicates the share of the population living on income representing 60% of the median income, that is to say a sum which divides the population into two equal parts in number, above and below this sum.

In France, the median income (which INSEE calls “median standard of living”) stood at 2018 euros per month in 1710 (net salaries + any social benefits). We are therefore poor in the statistical sense below 1026 euros per month and we understand that this index mainly reflects inequalities.

+ 60% dividends for the richest

However, if inequalities increased in France in 2018, it is also due to the very sharp increase in certain capital income, in particular dividends received by the richest households in 2018 (around + 60%). For INSEE: “This increase in dividends paid to households would result from the implementation of the single flat-rate levy (PFU) [flat tax] which lowers the taxation of certain income from assets.”

In 2018, INSEE also saw changes in the Gini index, another statistical measure of inequality. This index varies between 0 and 1, the value 0 corresponding to perfect equality (everyone has the same standard of living), the value 1 to extreme inequality (one person has all the income and the others have no Nothing). It fell in France from 0,289 in 2017 to 0,294 in 2018.

Over a longer period, theInequality Observatory explains that “throughout the 1970s to 1990s, the incomes of the poor and the rich tended to converge [but that] at the end of the 1990s, the differences began to rise for fifteen years”. The Observatory confides in a note published in September that its data stops in 2017, and that on this date, it noted a stabilization of income differences.

But the Flat Tax and the abolition of the Wealth Solidarity Tax (ISF) seem to have changed the situation. The most recent data made public by INSEE in its monthly bulletin Analysis clearly show that tax policy has caused inequality to rise again.

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source: RT

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