Context: The annual Poverty Watch report was released in October 2026 to coincide with the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. According to its data, approximately 15 million people in Poland live below the social minimum and about 2 million live in extreme poverty. These are different metrics. The social minimum calculated by Poland’s Institute of Labor and Social Affairs represents the expenses required to maintain a modest standard of living. Spending below this threshold does not necessarily indicate extreme poverty.
On October 24, 2026, the News.by website published an episode of the program Actual Interview featuring Iryna Novikava, the head of the Department of Management, Business Technologies, and Sustainable Development at the Belarusian State Technological University. While discussing a report on poverty in Poland, Novikava compared the poverty figures with those for Belarus.
“For comparison, let me give you the figure for our country. Here, 0.2% of the population falls below that threshold. If, out of their 15 million people, two million fall below it, then here, 0.2% amounts to just 18,000 people across all of Belarus. We know there are socially marginalized people, heavy drinkers, and so on.”
The two million residents of Poland that Novikava referred to are people living below the extreme poverty line. This line is defined using the “minimum egzystencji” indicator, which is the minimum amount of resources necessary for subsistence. According to the description of the Polish methodology, the threshold for a single-person household of working age was 1,021.67 zlotys per month, or about €230. In 2025, 5.3% of Poland’s population, or about 2 million people, lived below the extreme poverty line.
In Belarus, low-income status is defined by the subsistence minimum budget. People living in households whose per capita disposable resources fall below this threshold are classified as low-income. The threshold is 535 rubles, or approximately €160. According to Belstat data, nearly 3.5% of Belarus’s population had incomes below the subsistence minimum in 2025. That is more than 300,000 people, not 18,000. Novikava underestimated the proportion of low-income individuals by approximately 17 times.
Although the Belarusian figure is lower than Poland’s 5.3%, one cannot draw direct conclusions about differences in living standards from this. The two countries use different poverty thresholds: Poland’s minimum subsistence level and Belarus’s minimum subsistence budget. The 15 million Polish residents living in households whose expenditures fall below the social minimum must be considered separately. This indicator encompasses a broader range of material constraints than those associated with extreme poverty. Belarusian statistics do not provide a comparable indicator against which this estimate could be assessed.
* The First News Channel is another name for News.by, a news outlet owned by Belteleradiocompany.
