In 2013, more than 122 million people (nearly 25%) in the European Union were at risk of poverty or social exclusion.
They were hit by poverty resulting from insufficient income, or without adequate resources to meet basic household costs, or living in a household with insufficient work. Some people fell into more than one category.
The 2013 figure of 24.5% is barely different from the situation in 2008 when Eurostat reported that 23.8% of the population were so affected.
Indeed, since then the risk has gone up in most of the countries of the EU, with seven exceptions: Poland, Romania, Austria, Finland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and France.
Portugal is one of the countries where the risk has risen. In 2008, the percentage at risk was 26% (2.76 million people) growing to 27.4% (2.88 million folks) by 2013.
Most of these people were at risk of income poverty, meaning that their disposable income was below the threshold of 60% of the national average.
While Portugal was above the EU average of 24.5%, the level of risk was yet more severe in other countries, such as Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Latvia and Hungary where more than a third of the populations were at risk.
The statistics also showed on one of the measures that 12,200 Portuguese households in 2013 were ones where on average the adults worked less than 20% of their total work potential in the last year.
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