Any European cities I have ever visited had homeless or beggars on the street. Or these people may not necessarily be homeless but it is clear enough that they are extremely poor and need help from the social security.

However, these European countries generally implement the good welfare system due to higher taxation, compared to other developed countries/districts including USA, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong. The countries include even the first-world countries like Italy, Germany, France, and my Swedish friend said it is also common in Stockholm.

So why is the homeless and beggars so common in Europe (Western and Scandinavia), despite its high-tax, large-welfare system, and why do these people not seem to have access to it? Is it only in prominent urban cities or also common in suburban and rural?

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### EDIT

Some people asked me some data source. According to [the following data](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_population), homeless rate is much lower in Japan and South Korea (.004% and .022%), compared to Austria (.21%), France (.21%), Germany (.14%), Denmark (.11%), Sweden (.36%), UK (.46%), which is still higher than Canada (.09%) and mostly than USA (.17%). 

Another source is from [this Japanese website](http://bigissue-online.jp/archives/1070340767.html), on which a Japanese NGO interviewed EU commissioners. The EU commissioners said there are about 900,000 homeless across the entire EU (0.17% based on 508M population) and from the way it is written, it only includes homeless and not beggars.

While homeless rate in USA and Canada are on par with that in European countries, they don't implement the high-tax, large-welfare system. So if there are differences, these countries should rather have higher homeless rate. That is the point of my question.

And in "European countries/cities", I meant that in Western Europe and Scandinavia, which are economically more developed and have greater social security.