How should relative poverty be defined and measured in a European Union where there are substantial variations in … suggests that Europe-wide comparisons are more important to the perception of poverty than the convention of national relative … poverty lines would have led us to expect. Even relative poverty is more prevalent in the new low-income (eastern) countries …

reduced poverty. Yet given the extent of public resources invested, was this the most that policy makers could expect in terms … of reducing poverty? To answer this question, I estimate a discrete choice model of work and welfare participation … decisions, and use the behavioral estimates to derive the policy parameters that would have minimized poverty among lone mothers …