Poverty and deprivation in Hungarian settlements after the Millennium – an attempt at creating a rural deprivation index

Abstract

Poverty research has a centuries-old tradition and has become a multi-coloured research field both by the research tools applied and its methodology. Traditionally, sociology addresses issues concerning poverty; however, keeping these research interests within one discipline would be a misleading approach, since territorial development and development policies (Lowe et al. 1986) must also deal with poverty issues: demarcation of developed and developing territories and relevant development policies necessarily aim at reducing and eliminating poverty.

Although addressing the territorial aspect of poverty has been challenged in both approaches, it has not formed a coherent research focus. The aim of this paper is to make an attempt to fill this gap and justify these two approaches. According to Peter Towsend (1979, 31.), poverty is defined as a multi-dimensional shortage of resources and opportunities that, for instance, hinders maintaining socially accepted life circumstances and limits participation in education or employment. This kind of deprivation is usually addressed at individual-family level; however, it has highly significant spatial aspects, too. Actual geographical space is not homogeneous because it does not provide equal opportunities to meet people’s needs that led some Anglo-Saxon scholars in the ‘80s to suggest that urban and rural areas have a distinct nature of deprivation. In line with that, the selection of variables is a deliberate process, because inappropriate variables would lead to revealing urban and rural differences instead of identifying multidimensional poverty. Therefore, aspects of housing, qualification, labour market participation, income conditions and demographics have been considered in the study as well.

These variables have been standardised (“Z-score”) with the rural average and the deviation calculated from the sample and defined for three years (1990, 2001, 2011). Afterwards, a principal component analysis has been carried out in order to see if the standardised variables can be converted into a comprehensive deprivation indicator. In order to define the indicator with the same set of variables for a multiple-year result, both the time range was narrowed down (2001, 2011) and the number of variables was reduced, too. High values of the deprivation indicator suggest that people live even under the rural average according to certain poverty dimensions (housing, income, labour market opportunities and qualification). In other words, the higher the value of the indicator is, the lower the average social status is. The deprivation indicator can clearly illustrate the usual spatial structure of the country: Large towns and their narrow and broad agglomerations can be identified as the prosperous poles of the country, while with increasing distance, more and more factors show significant levels of poverty.

Analysing the factors affecting the deprivation indicator using a linear regression estimating function results in the finding that the greater the population of a settlement is and the closer located to a county capital, the lower the value of the deprivation indicator is. If a certain settlement is a subregion capital or part of suburbia, the deprivation indicator shows some improvement.

To sum up, the deprivation indicator, even with its obvious imperfections, can be an effective tool in case of decision making on resource distribution to address poverty issues. Furthermore, it can also be used as a background variable when investigating social phenomena.