Fewer Poles at risk of poverty: official

"While in 2016, almost 6.5 million people were at risk of relative poverty in Poland, a year later there were 872,000 fewer," said Deputy Family, Labour and Social Policy Minister Elżbieta Bojanowska.

She added that among Poland’s efforts to tackle poverty was the government’s flagship "500-plus" child benefit programme.

Poland’s socially conservative Law and Justice government, which came to power in late 2015, aims to ease the burdens of child rearing by giving families with two or more children a handout of PLN 500 (USD 145, EUR 118) a month per child.

Poorer families receive the allowance even if they have just one child.

Meanwhile, the government’s "Good Start" programme aims to subsidise the purchase of school supplies for children by offering parents a handout of PLN 300 for every child before the start of each school year.

The proportion of children at risk of poverty or social exclusion in Poland fell by 6.3 percentage points in 2017, the EU’s statistics agency has said, according to a report.

The plunge marks the biggest drop in the rate for Poland since the country entered the European Union in 2004, the Dziennik daily has reported, citing Eurostat.

(pk/gs)

Source: IAR