<mark>enumeration units) and a secondary sampling unit (dwellings).</mark><sup>23</sup> <mark>There is stratification in the first</mark> stage of sampling, based on 88 strata (urban and rural areas plus counties) (ibid).

# **<mark>The EU-SILC survey instrument is structured to gather the AROPE indicators at both household</mark>**

**<mark>and individual levels, enabling comprehensive AROPE monitoring across the 27 EU countries.</mark>** <mark>While this dataset enables the assessment of multiple deprivations among several vulnerable groups, it does not allow the assessment of deprivations among the Roma population due to the unavailability of ethnicity information. Very few EU countries currently have ethnic identifiers in the official household surveys. In addition, they suffer from significant data challenges (see Annex 1), underscoring the need for careful consideration when interpreting and utilizing ethnic data collected as part of the official household surveys.</mark>

**To monitor AROPE changes over time, we build a measure of absolute multidimensional poverty (“anchored AROPE”).** The at-risk-of-poverty measures income inequalities rather than direct poverty, as the poverty threshold varies with income distribution **.** Therefore, we anchored the poverty line to the year 2019 to track absolute income poverty and deflate the monetary welfare aggregates with the HCPI (Harmonized Consumer Price Index). This adjustment in the monetary component helps to ensure that the poverty threshold remains fixed or anchored and consistent across different years, allowing for more accurate comparisons of poverty rates over time.<sup>24</sup> Together with material and social deprivation<sup>25</sup> (the absolute component of the AROPE) and low work intensity, which captures exclusion from the labor market, they constitute the anchored AROPE, an absolute measure of multidimensional poverty.<sup>26</sup>

**<mark>To overcome some of the AROPE shortcomings mentioned in section II, we looked at the overlapping of deprivations and expanded the AROPE framework.</mark>** <mark>Given the potential sensitivity of the measure to the dimensions added, we run some sensitivity analysis, including different combinations of individual deprivations.  We also construct a modified version of the AROPE (AROPE +) while ensuring alignment with the framework's essence</mark><sup>27</sup> <mark>. The measure of AROPE + extends the AROPE indicator in two ways. First, it extends the material and social deprivation indicator by incorporating an additional deprivation at the household level to account for housing conditions; we use a variable that indicates if the person lives in an overcrowded dwelling</mark><sup>28</sup> <mark>, that is, if the average number of people per room available to the household is greater than two, following the definition of Weziak-Bialowolska and Dijkstra</mark>

> 23 Source: Gesis, 2021

> 24 Other studies have emphasized the need to measure and monitor an absolute measure of poverty in the EU (Menyhért et al.,2021), but have focused more on constructing absolute measures of monetary poverty, rather than on constructing an absolute measure of multidimensional poverty.

> 25 We follow Eurostat’s criteria for the construction of material and social deprivation for children. Specifically, the same set of 13 items (see Table 2) and thresholds are used for adults and children. However, because individual items are collected for people aged 16 or above, a child is considered deprived in an item if at least half of the adults in the household lack that item. As a result, adult items carry less weight in computing children's deprivation. Additionally, for a child to be considered materially and socially deprived at least three of the deprivations must be householdlevel items out of the seven household deprivation items included in the list.

> 26 Eurostat does not publish a measure of anchored AROPE, only a measure of anchored AROP.

> 27 As a result, we did not implement a new approach for measuring the weights of the indicators; rather, we assumed equal weighting. Moreover, equal weights are easy to communicate. Using equal weights across dimensions suggests that all domains are considered equally important. This approach ensures that no single dimension is given more importance in the analysis.

> 28 While we add this variable to the list of household-level deprivations, we do not modify the number of deprivations (threshold) required to be materially and socially deprived.

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