Statistics Finland has said that as many as 700,000 people in the country could be classed as “very low income earners”, with one-fifth of that number made up by young adults.
Besides unemployed people, who made up 23 per cent of the figure, young people between the ages of 18 and 24 had the highest risk of facing poverty, said the data agency, while the group between the ages of 18 and 34 made up 45 per cent of the number of people in danger of poverty.
The most recent poverty data from the statistics group is from 2013, when people were classed as being at risk of falling into poverty if their household brought in below 1,190 euros a month, or 14,260 per year. A household’s income includes earned and property income as well as transfers, while taxes are deducted.
The agency said that persons most at risk of poverty were those whose income was less than 40 per cent of the median income – or under 990 euros a month. In this group were students between the ages of 18 and 24 and people that had been jobless for six months or longer.
Groups considered as being near the poverty classification were those earning between 990 and 1,190 euros a month; however, those said to have the greatest risk of poverty had disposable monthly incomes of under 792 euros – the group into which a large number of unemployed and young people fell.