A Quantitative Evaluation of the Greek Social Solidarity Income

This note presents the results of the evaluation of the Greek Social Solidarity Income (SSI) program, a last resort safety net program targeted to extremely poor households with the objective of alleviating poverty in Greece. At the time of finalizing this report, the SSI program absorbed slightly less than half a percentage point of GDP, in line with the program’s budgetary allocation. The SSI reached about 320,000 households in Greece, or approximately 650,000 people. Nationally, this translates to about 6.5 percent of the population, remarkably close to the program’s original target of reaching about 7 percent of the country’s population.

The program extended about 220 euros on average on a monthly basis to household meeting three criteria at the same time (income, assets, and residency, as described in the Annex). The objective of this evaluation is to assess the effectiveness of the SSI program’s targeting methodology as well as its impact on poverty indicators. The findings presented are based on data collected through a tailor-made nationally representative survey run for the purposes of evaluating the SSI.