In 2020, the poverty rate touched 14.6% of the French population. A stable figure compared to 2019. If the aid of the state has allowed many people not to sink, the poorest seem to have slipped even more into precariousness.
Le Monde
The crisis related to the Pandemic of Covid-19, which resulted in a fall of 8% of GDP for the year 2020, did it explode poverty in France? In the fall of 2020, alert, a collective of associations, sounded the alarm: one million people would have switched into precariousness because of the crisis. A year later, Wednesday, November 3, INSEE delivers a study that relativises the impact of the crisis: in 2020, the poverty rate – which is defined as a standard of living below 60% of the median standard of living – touched 14.6% of the French population, or 9.3 million people. A stable figure compared to 2019. Inequalities, according to this estimate, would not have evolved more. In other words, the historic recession of 2020 will not have increased poverty in France.
“The stability of the level of living and monetary poverty inequality is explained by the exceptional measures put in place to combat the effects of the health crisis,” according to INSEE. Partial activity has thus avoided an explosion of unemployment, targeted aid supported household income, and the Fonds de solidarité compensated, at least in part, the fall in the revenue of the self-employed. Without these various devices, calculates INSEE, the poverty rate would have increased by 0.6 points and inequalities would have increased. In addition, “it is impossible to assess the extent of business bankruptcies and job destruction that would have happened” without these support devices.
Methodology
Nevertheless, the conclusion of this study, the admission of the Director General of INSEE, Jean-Luc Tavernier, who explains in a blog article, “can surprise” . One of the explanations lies in the methodology used. The survey only focuses on metropolitan France, and on ordinary households according to the Nomenclature of INSEE, namely 95% of the French population.
It thus excludes people living in community or community – student residences, retirement homes, barracks, prisons … – and homeless people, totaling 1.4 million people. Among these categories of population, if the elderly, whose pensions have not been affected, have not lost income, students, on the other hand, have been massively affected, losing their little jobs.
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