and non-poor people. Dotto et al. (2017) use the longitudinal component of the EU-Statistics survey on income and living conditions and develop a dynamic latent class model for evaluating material deprivation (without resorting to arbitrarily specified thresholds) over the period 20102013 in Greece, Italy, and the UK. While these studies contribute to understanding aspects of chronic poverty and material deprivations within Europe, none of these studies have looked at the extent of chronic poverty or material deprivations among the Roma population. Furthermore, they either focus on specific dimensions such as material deprivation or analyze persistence primarily from an income perspective, with few directly addressing chronic multidimensional poverty.

**The paper is organized as follows.** Section II introduces the conceptual framework. Section III presents the data and empirical strategy. Section IV presents empirical results, including an analysis of the EU trends in absolute multidimensional poverty, the extent, composition, and mechanisms behind multidimensional poverty in four EU countries, and an analysis of multidimensional poverty among the Roma in Bulgaria, which also includes an assessment of chronic income poverty and material deprivations among this group. Section V concludes and provides policy implications.

# II. Conceptual Framework

**Conventional poverty measures have typically been centered around income or expenditure, which in most countries is based on a minimal threshold necessary to afford a basic basket of essential goods and services.** However, these monetary measures may only partially encompass the various dimensions of well-being. Additionally, while monetary poverty strongly correlates with deprivations in other domains, this correlation is far from perfect ( <mark>World Bank (2022); Evans et al., 2024)</mark> . Multidimensional poverty metrics have emerged to bridge this gap and have gained official recognition within the United Nations' 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Specifically, they are embodied in "SDG 1.2.2" which assesses the proportion of people of all ages, both men and women, living in poverty across all dimensions as defined by each nation's unique criteria.<sup>15</sup> The monetary approach depends on information collected from household surveys that track household spending and incomes.

**One approach to address the multidimensional aspect of poverty is to evaluate the extent of deprivation within each dimension separately, thereby constructing a comprehensive set of indicators.** This approach yields a set of poverty indicators that not only includes the traditional income poverty rate but also encompasses deprivations in various other dimensions of wellbeing. These may include statistics on undernourishment, illiteracy, and the lack of access to improved sanitation. This approach offers valuable insights across multiple dimensions of poverty but often falls short of revealing the degree of overlap between different deprivations or the joint distribution of disadvantages. The ambiguity arises because these indicators alone cannot distinguish between scenarios where no one experiences multiple deprivations or scenarios where a large share of the population experiences all deprivations concurrently.

## **A different approach goes further and constructs multidimensional poverty measures, with the advantage of allowing the identification of multiple overlapping deprivations** . While the

> 15 SDG Indicator 1.2.2 (National Multidimensional Poverty) distinguishes itself from other indicators within the Global SDG Indicator Framework by not imposing a universal methodology. Instead, it empowers each country to establish its national multidimensional poverty measure. This approach acknowledges the diversity of circumstances and priorities across nations, allowing for a more nuanced and context-specific assessment of poverty and well-being.

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