Official statistics do not reveal the true scale of poverty in Lithuania, according to a new study. Almost one in five people in Lithuania are struggling to make ends meet, but because they do not qualify for social support or do not ask for state assistance, they remain invisible.
"The first thing that strikes me is the scale," said Asta Gaigalienė, associate professor at the Faculty of Economics and Management of Vytautas Magnus University.
"When we take into account that the survey was carried out digitally, how many people were not able to fill it in because they simply do not have the skills? I think that the actual number is even higher," she added.
Officially, around 586,000 people in Lithuania were at risk of poverty in 2022. However, the true number may be much higher.
The recent study, Discovering the Invisibles: What the Official Statistics Don't Tell Us About the Vulnerable Social Groups?, conducted by universities in the Baltic states, showed that a large segment of people in need is not included in public data.
For example, a divorced person whose financial situation suddenly worsens, but their income is still too high to qualify for social assistance, will not be included on the list of those in need. Other examples include a family affected by the illness or one of the breadwinners passing away.
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"Statistics usually include socio-demographic factors like income, age, gender and so on. [State] decisions are made based on only one or two of these dimensions, but statistics do not capture attitudes, people's motivations or look at a combination of several factors," said Valters Kaže, Vice Rector of Riga University of Applied Sciences.
Some of the invisible people do not ask for state support due to stigma, or because they do not trust the institutions. According to researchers, such people find themselves in a vicious circle, unable to escape poverty because they lack knowledge and money, or are dealing with psychological issues.
"There are strict criteria for who can receive [social support], creating the risk of [the state] not seeing all the people in need," said Karčiauskienė, deputy director of Caritas of the Vilnius Archdiocese.
According to Social Security and Labour Minister Monika Navickienė, municipal institutions have better knowledge of their constituents and could be more proactive.
"Municipalities have the power to make individual decisions even when the situation of a particular person does not fit into the framework of the descriptions, and they can react," said Navickien.
LRT English
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