Mapping poverty and social exclusion: a portrait of the Greek regions during the economic crisis

Poverty has been a matter of great academic and political concern for decades. In the recent years, the interest has increased considerably at the European Union level because poverty seems to be a relatively persistent phenomenon and a threat to economic prosperity and social cohesion of the Union. The aim of this paper is to assess and map, for the first time, the distribution of poverty at the NUTS III level in Greece, as well as to evaluate and map the regional impact of the ongoing economic crisis on poverty, by comparing the poverty rates before and during the crisis. For this purpose a Small Area Estimation technique is employed in order to estimate poverty rates at low levels of geographical aggregation. Spatial variation is a relatively neglected dimension of poverty analysis and poverty maps that provide a description of the spatial distribution of welfare and poverty within a country at different spatial levels may be a useful tool for policy-making.