Member States have so far made use of the commonly agreed indicators to quite varying degrees. While many countries did use indicators to provide a description of the state of affairs with regard to poverty and social exclusion, these descriptions were not, on the whole, integrated into the central part of the NAPs/inclusion, which deals with the strategic approach to combating poverty and social exclusion. One of the reasons for the limited framing of policies in relation to the common indicators in the NAPs/inclusion is that the social indicators have not to date been very fully exploited for analytical purposes. As pointed out in Chapter 1, the social indicators have not yet been used to “tell a story” about differences across Member States and about the relation between different dimensions of social exclusion, or about the impact of Enlargement.

The aim of this Chapter is to explore how much one can learn about these key questions just by restricting ourselves to the body of aggregate information now represented by the common indicators. It should be emphasised that we do not, in general, attempt to consider other sources of empirical evidence, be it aggregate information or individual micro-data. Nor do we attempt to provide an overall explanation of poverty and social exclusion. Clearly, a proper account and understanding of the complex phenomena at stake would require a differentiated examination of the causes of poverty and social exclusion, based on a detailed and multi-dimensional analysis of the underlying micro-data on households and individuals, and drawing on a variety of sources and the extensive research literature available for individual countries. Such a (very valuable) enterprise would be well beyond the scope of the present Chapter. Instead, by deliberately limiting our analysis to the published common indicators, our aim is to bring out how their potential can be more fully exploited – and also the limits to such an analysis of aggregate information. The expectation is of course not that countries would rely solely on these common indicators in monitoring, analysing and reporting on social inclusion; rather, it is that the national indicators they develop and use for these purposes, together with in-depth multi-dimensional analysis of the underlying micro-data, should be linked back to the common indicators as far as possible, in order to facilitate mutual learning.