A quarter of Portugal's population was living in poverty or social exclusion in 2012, making the country in line with the EU average of 24.8% according Eurostat data released today.
In Portugal there was an increase of almost 1% between 2011 and 2012, with the number of people facing poverty or social exclusion rising from 24.4% to 25.3% of the population, equivalent to 2.7 million people.
Eurostat took into account three forms of exclusion - people at risk of poverty, people suffering deprivation and people living in households with few or no workers.
For Portugal the highest value was in the category of people at risk of poverty (17.9%) where they lived in a household with an annual net income of 60% or below the median income in the country, after payment of social security.
The highest proportions of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion were found in Bulgaria (49%), Romania (42%), Latvia (37%) and Greece (35%), and lowest in the Netherlands and the Czech Republic (15%) and Finland (17%).
