Poverty has never been a headline grabbing subject, not like terrorism or airline disasters. In the minds of many Europeans it is also something confined to the third world – and then only at times of severe drought or war. Yet in Europe poverty affects more than one in ten of the population and in many countries the numbers affected by it are growing each year.
By far the highest incidence of poverty is in Bulgaria where almost half the population are classified by the European Union as severely materially deprived. Like other states joining the EU the incidence of poverty initially declined from 57.7% in 2006 to 41.2% in 2008. However, since then severe material deprivation has risen each year to stand at 45.9% last year. Although Bulgaria remains the EU country most clearly at crisis point the threat of poverty across the European Union is disturbingly high – with a quarter of the population at risk of poverty or social exclusion.”
Why should employers worry about poverty and social exclusion? After all, a large pool of available labour and low wage rates can make a country attractive as a low cost production centre. But modern economies require more than large pools of cheap labour to sustain them. Bulgaria has been struggling in recent years to prevent a significant proportion of its population from leaving school at the earliest opportunity or to move towards the EU’s target of achieving a throughput of 40% of a country’s under 30 year old population through tertiary education (the latest figure is 29.4%).
But lack of educational investment is not the only factor giving rise to social deprivation. A country can temporarily protect its population from poverty, or the threat of it, even if it fails to improve its talent bank and suffers from high levels of unemployment. Such a country is Spain where last year only 6.2% of the population were classified as severely materially deprived,even though 23.6% of the population left school at the earliest opportunity (compared to an EU average of 12%) and where in July 53.8% of those under the age of 25 were unemployed.
So poverty can be defined in more than material terms. Do Spanish young people so readily drop out because they can see such little hope even if they improve their qualifications? Does it favour an economy if a population is protected from poverty even though it is failing? Is the biggest betrayal in such failing economies the governments that regulate them, the young people who do not invest in themselves or employers – particularly large multinational employers? Could not such employers do so much more to identify talent even at an early age and introduce sponsorships to take young people through tertiary education, improve their linguistic skills and provide mentors for schoolmates to start believing in themselves?
In my view neither parents, governments or employers can allow, on average, almost a quarter of their young people to grow up without any real experience of contributing to the economies that define the wider environment in which they live. Nor can modern societies retain political stability without economic benefits being shared by all. Engagement is not only a problem for company’s internal organizations – but a much bigger issue for us all.