Whereas economic and social progress ranks among the most fundamental objectives of the Treaty of Rome, European instruments have produced mixed results, according to the researchers.
Dating back to the 1970s, the first anti-poverty programme (Poverty I) was short-lived and not elaborated further because of member states’ opposition to what they considered a violation of their national sovereignty (UK, Germany).
In the 1990s, social protection and the eradication of poverty received a specific policy status, and a legal basis for the European fight against exclusion was laid down in the Treaty of Amsterdam. This approach was backed by the doctrine of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) which favoured coordination between national social protection systems. It was also supported by the positive impact of the EU structural and cohesion funds on underprivileged regions, introduced in the late 80s with the Single Market.
However, despite these initiatives, poverty today still affects 72 million citizens in the EU, i.e. 16% of the European population, according to the authors.
Alongside other factors of poverty, S. Bouquerel and P-A de Malleray blame the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), whose unintended effect on the high price of foodstuffs would have weighted too much for too long on European consumers, and particularly on poorer households, who tend to spend more on food than others.
But above all, the so-called "open method of coordination" governing EU employment and social policies since 1997 (and the Lisbon agenda since 2000) is seen by the authors as insufficient and not constraining enough to carry significant political weight. Instead, and in order to link between existing piecemeal actions towards poverty reduction, the researchers call for a genuine European policy of growth and wealth creation - simply because "the question of how to share the pie is secondary if the latter is too small."
