ABSTRACT
This chapter compares the prevalence of deprivation and poverty in Sweden and Great Britain in the early 1990s. It discusses the two basic concepts: deprivation and poverty. The concept of deprivation and deprivation indices have been widely applied since Peter Townsend’s path breaking work. A precondition for a comparison is that deprivation can be measured against a standard that has social relevance in each country involved in the study. The difference in the unemployment rate will almost certainly be a cause of differences in the prevalence of deprivation in the two countries at the beginning of the 1990s. Income, unemployment, dependence on means tested benefits, age, and gender are all conditions that can be assumed to have an impact on the prevalence of deprivation and poverty. The problem of relative deprivation is more severe among Britons than among Swedes and, deprivation is distributed more unevenly in Britain than in Sweden.
