20% of Greek Homes Below Poverty Line

Roughly one in five households in Greece, Spain, Bulgaria and Croatia live below the poverty threshold, meaning that their total income - including welfare transfers - is less than 60 percent of the average in their country, according to a press release issued by the European Commission. The percentage of households below the poverty line for the European Union as a whole was estimated to be 16 percent, with the smallest percentages found in the Czech Republic and the Netherlands (less than 10 percent).

According to the press release, those most at risk from poverty are those with a low level of education. In Greece, 29.6 percent of individuals with low education were poor based on official figures (24.2 percent for the EU as a whole).

Poverty also affected 19.7 percent of those with medium-level education (14 percent average in EU) and 7.3 percent of those with higher education (7.1 percent average in EU).

Finally, Greece and Cyprus are the only EU countries in which the number of men in higher education is greater than the number of women.