Reference Budgets for Social Participation: leading the way to a social inclusive society. What we learned and results for Spain

Reference Budgets are priced baskets of goods and services that represent a given living standard for well-described model families and are seen as an alternative approach to measure poverty lines, which could serve to assess social policies, as well as they can be used to other purposes in the financial and educational fields. This report describes the process of development and the content of the different baskets on the Spanish Reference Budgets built as a part of the European funded ImPRovE project, in which cross-nationally comparable reference budgets have been developed for different European countries using a common theoretical framework and methodology. In our case, the city of reference is Barcelona. Thus, the structure of this paper has two main parts: in the first one the common theoretical framework and methodology are briefly presented, along with the general articularities of the development of the Spanish Reference Budgets. In the second section the components of every basket and the process to build them is described in detail. Finally, we draw some conclusions.