Unemployment, social protection spending and child poverty in the European Union during the Great Recession

The 2008 financial crisis triggered the first contraction of the world economy in the post-war era. This article investigates the effect of the Great Recession on child poverty across the EU-27 plus Iceland, Norway and Switzerland and studies the extent to which social protection spending may have s...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of European social policy 2017-05, Vol.27 (2), p.123-137
Main Author: Chzhen, Yekaterina
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Child poverty
Child welfare
Children
Children & youth
Contextual effects
Economic crisis
Expenditures
Family work relationship
GDP
Global economy
Gross Domestic Product
Individual differences
Labor market
Low income groups
Poverty
Protection
Recessions
Risk
Social protection
Sociodemographics
Thresholds
Unemployment
Welfare state
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The 2008 financial crisis triggered the first contraction of the world economy in the post-war era. This article investigates the effect of the Great Recession on child poverty across the EU-27 plus Iceland, Norway and Switzerland and studies the extent to which social protection spending may have softened the negative impact of the economic crisis on children. While the risks of child poverty are substantially higher in countries with higher rates of working-age unemployment, suggesting a significant impact of the Great Recession on household incomes via the labour market, the study finds evidence for social protection spending cushioning the blow of the crisis at least to some extent. Children were significantly less likely to be poor in countries with higher levels of social protection spending in 2008–2013, even after controlling for the socio-demographic structure of the population, per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and the working-age unemployment rate. The poverty-dampening contextual effect of social spending was greater for the poverty risks of children in very low work intensity families and large families. The study uses two complementary thresholds of income poverty, both based on 60 percent of the national median: a relative poverty line and a threshold anchored in 2008. Although the choice of a poverty line makes a difference to aggregate child poverty rates, individual-level risks of a child being poor associated with a range of household-level characteristics are similar for the two poverty lines.
ISSN:0958-9287
1461-7269
DOI:10.1177/0958928716676549