Sample Project

The Small Area Methods for Poverty and Living Condition Estimates (SAMPLE) project is a research project funded by the European Commission under its Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The Lisbon European Council (March 2000), assisted by the indications of the Nice European Council (December 2000) and by the Gothenburg Council (2001), agreed to put in place an EU strategy by the year 2010.aiming at making a decisive impact on the eradication of poverty in the European Union Countries. In addition, year 2010 has been declared as the year of the struggle against poverty. The realisation of these aims relies on the development of efficient, effective and reliable indicators and on the collection of high quality data on life conditions not only at national level but also at regional and lower geographical levels.


SAMPLE has four main objective:

• to develop new indicators that will provide a deeper insight in understanding inequality and poverty with special focus on social exclusion and deprivation;
• to develop statistical models for estimating these indicators and their corresponding statistical accuracy measures at the local (small area) level;
• to implement procedures for producing and interpreting the poverty indicators;
• to provide a collection of reliable and informative indicators of poverty and deprivation defined at local area level, useful for Local Government Agencies.
• SAMPLE’s objectives will be realised
• by combining data from national surveys with rich data from the Census and local administrative databases;
• by employing a European, cross-institution interdisciplinary team of experts in poverty research and small area estimation;
• by consulting with policy makers, stakeholders and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).

Data of the local stakeholders, who are in direct contact with experiencing poverty, will surely have a crucial role in order to identify and develop new poverty indicators. The EU-SILC survey data will be integrated with these local administrative databases. In the project, an over-sampling of EU-SILC is done for the Province of Pisa (Local Administrative Unit 1 level) in the Tuscany region.