Households without children in Serbia have the highest risk of poverty in Europe on average, with 37.1 percent receiving less than 60 percent of median income after settlement, Eurostat said.
The European Union reckons that those at risk are those who are deprived of four of the nine categories: regular rent or utility payments, sufficient heating, meals with meat or fish every other day, one-week vacations outside the home, car, washing machine, TV or phone.
Similar situation is observed in Northern Macedonia (36.2 percent), Latvia (35.5) and Bulgaria (35.2).
The most vulnerable category of population surveyed lives in single-member households.
When analyzing households living with children, only Turkey and Northern Macedonia are ranked lower than at-risk-of-poverty by Serbia, with just over 44.5 percent of the total population at risk of slipping into poverty. The countries with the lowest risk in both observed categories are the Czech Republic, Iceland and Slovakia, where the at-risk-of-poverty rate does not exceed 14 percent.
Eurostat also said on the occasion of International Day for the Eradication of Poverty that about seven percent of EU households in 2018 failed to pay their rent or utility bills on time in the past 12 months.
The worst situation was in Greece and Bulgaria, where about a third of all households were late with payments, and the best situation was in the Netherlands, where only one and a half percent of residents do not pay their bills regularly, Nova Ekonomija reports.
