Measuring socioeconomic disintegration at the local level in Europe: an analytical framework

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present some reflections on the measurement of social deprivation in localities within the European Union (EU). The stress is on ‘socioeconomically disintegrated’ localities, that is, those with severe problems of social and economic restructuring (Moulaert et al, 1992; 1993; 1994). Several considerations have inspired this paper. First of all, since the last oil crisis at the end of the 1980s, social inequalities between regions and localities have increased in Europe and their study has become urgent (European Commission, 1991; Suarez-Villa and Roura, 1992). However, while we have systematic data illustrating this unevenness at the level of the regions, for localities this statistical measurement is extremely difficult to accomplish. Until now, we have to satisfy our curiosity by looking at some sparse data on unemployment, pockets of poverty and welfare incomes and by looking at aggregate information on socio-economic structure, etc. This brings us to the second reason for this paper, namely, the strong need to improve data on social deprivation at the local level. A third reason is of a more methodological order. There exists a tendency to study social exclusion in a strictly empiricist way (using statistical analysis and descriptive monographs), without looking at the qualitative aspects of the mechanisms underlying the generation of poverty at the local or the supralocal level. The viewpoint that will be defended here is that it is impossible to build a good statistical basis for studying local socioeconomic exclusion without a good theoretical analysis of the mechanisms leading to the exclusion of parts of the local populations. The paper will address the following issues. First, it will provide some elements for building an analytical framework for studying socioeconomic exclusion at the local level.