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A homeless man in Paris.

Poverty in France has fallen by 60% over thirty years. Although it affected 15% of the population in 1970, in 2001 only 6.1% (or 3.7 million people) were below the poverty line (which, according to INSEE's criteria, is half of the median income).

Before, the poor were for the most part retirees. The trend reversed itself in the 1980s with an increase in unemployment among young people; while poverty among the elderly dropped 85% (from 27.3% to 3.8%), among those still in the workforce it increased by 38% over the same 30 years (from 3.9% to 5.4%). Various social welfare programs have had an important impact in low-income households, and in 2002, they may in some cases have represented more than 50% of the household's income.^[1]

Status in 2005

In 2005, the poverty line was fixed at 645 euros per person per month. By comparison, the revenu minimum d'insertion (RMI, which idea draws on guaranteed minimum income, although it is not distributed to any one) was at that time 440.86 euros per month for a person living alone.^[2] The French poverty line is slightly higher than that of the United States,^[3] suggesting that some who would be considered living in poverty in France would not be if they had the same income in the United States. However, it is difficult to compare them as they are not calculated in the same way, notwithstanding differences in cost or standards of living. While the French poverty threshold is calculated as being half of the median income, the U.S. poverty threshold is based on dollar costs of the economy food plan, that is, on income inequality^[4]

In 2005:

• A million children (8%) were living below the poverty line;
• 42,000 children were affected by lead poisoning, a sign of decrepit housing; lead-based paint has been forbidden for building painters since 1915, to all professionals since 1948, and to everyone since 1993. The risk of exposure to lead today is four times greater for buildings constructed before 1915 than for a building constructed between 1915 and 1948.
• 500,000 housing units were unclean.
• 200,000 students were in difficult financial situations, which has led young women to pay for their studies by selling their "services," e.g. by placing ads for prostitution on the Internet. This phenomenon is on the rise in the country (in 2006, the students' union SUD Etudiant estimated the number to be 40,000).^[5]

Nevertheless, social services allow France to have one of the lowest child mortality rates despite this poverty.

Despite the positive developments, it seems that rural areas have been attracting more and more of those left behind; a non-negligible segment of at-risk city populations have been moving to the country and joining the ranks of small-time farmers among "rural" welfare recipients. This phenomenon is partly explained by the lower cost of rural living compared to the expense of city life.^[6]

Another indicator of poverty is the RMI. In 1994, in metropolitan France, the number of RMI recipients was 783,436; ten years later (in June 2004), it rose to 1,041,026. In the overseas departments, it was 105,033 at the end of 1994 and 152,892 in June 2004.^[7] By 31 December 2005, the figure stood at 1,112,400. From December 2004 to December 2005, the number of RMI recipients increased by 4.7% according to the Secours catholique NGO.^[8]

Bidonvilles

Although poverty seems to have decreased overall, a form of extreme misery has reappeared in the 2000s. The media have attracted attention to bidonvilles (shanty towns), which were thought to have disappeared in the 1970s, with the transformation of Nanterre's bidonville into a modern city (at the end of the 1960s, there were 89 shanty towns on the outskirts of Paris, and 43% of French Algerians lived in bidonvilles in 1963, a year after the Evian Accords put an end to the Algerian War^[9]). Such urban communities, without roads or public services (no electricity, one access point to water), are a reality for example in Villeurbanne (Lyon), where a bidonville contains 500 persons with Roma origins, a third of them being children.^[10][11][12] In February 2007, bulldozers destroyed a bidonville in Bobigny, near Paris, where 266 Romanian and Bulgarian citizens had been registered.^{[13][14][15][16]}

Furthermore, bidonvilles are common in the overseas departments.^[17]

See also

• Abbé Pierre
• Poverty by country

Footnotes

References

• Report by the Conseil de l'emploi, des revenus et de la cohésion sociale (CERC), February 17, 2005 [1]
• April 2005 report on poverty in France by Emmaüs given by its president Martin Hirsch to the ministre des Solidarités, de la Santé et de la Famille Philippe Douste-Blazy

Notes

• This article is based on the French Wikipedia article Pauvreté en France, retrieved February 15, 2007.

External links

• (French) Seuils de pauvreté en France, sur le site de l'INSEE
• (French) Taux de pauvreté en France, sur le site de l'INSEE
• (French) Observatoire national de la pauvreté et de l’exclusion sociale
• (French) Observatoire des Inégalités, Données sur la pauvreté