Social Status Inequalities in Child Poverty in the European Union, Working Paper

The main objective of this report is to descriptively analyse child poverty and the relationship between parental background and material living conditions among children, across and within European Union (EU) Member States, while also capturing trajectories in the period of and following the Great Recession. The report provides descriptive statistics on main trends, while the focus of the analysis was on the changes in indicators over time and by parental education. We cover the EU-28 Member States, plus the three additional EEA member countries (Iceland, Norway and Switzerland). Our findings show that there is a considerable difference in the evolution of poverty and material living conditions of children within EU member states depending on what poverty concept and what measure is applied to monitor these trends. Also, the choice of the indicator not only affects changes over time, but also cross-country comparative results. Empirical results indicate that there are large disparities by social status (measured here by the highest education level of parents) behind the overall child poverty and material living conditions trends in most of the EU countries: at EU-28 level in 2016, relative income poverty rates among children with low educated parents were twice larger than among those with parents having completed secondary education and six time larger compared to children with parents having a diploma. When severe material deprivation rates are analysed, these inequalities are even more striking. Finally, changes in time in child poverty indicators were driven at first place by changes in the poverty outcomes of low status children: a large share of them saw severe variation in the material living conditions of their families.