Children of Austerity: Impact of the Great Recession on Child Poverty in Rich Countries
Bea Cantillon, Yekaterina Chzhen, Sudhanshu Handa, and Brian Nolan
Abstract
The 2008 financial crisis triggered the worst global recession since the Great Depression. Many OECD countries responded to the crisis by reducing social spending. Through eleven diverse country case studies (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States), this volume describes the evolution of child poverty and material well-being during the crisis, and links these outcomes with the responses by governments. The analysis underlines that countries with fragmented social protection systems were less able to protect the incomes of ... More
The 2008 financial crisis triggered the worst global recession since the Great Depression. Many OECD countries responded to the crisis by reducing social spending. Through eleven diverse country case studies (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States), this volume describes the evolution of child poverty and material well-being during the crisis, and links these outcomes with the responses by governments. The analysis underlines that countries with fragmented social protection systems were less able to protect the incomes of households with children at the time when unemployment soared. In contrast, countries with more comprehensive social protection cushioned the impact of the crisis on households with children, especially if they had implemented fiscal stimulus packages at the onset of the crisis. Although the macroeconomic ‘shock’ itself and the starting positions differed greatly across countries, while the responses by governments covered a very wide range of policy levers and varied with their circumstances, cuts in social spending and tax increases often played a major role in the impact that the crisis had on the living standards of families and children.
Keywords:
children,
poverty,
economic crisis,
Great Recession,
material deprivation,
unemployment,
social spending
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198797968 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2017 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198797968.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Bea Cantillon, editor
Director, Hermand Deleeck Centre for Social Policy, University of Antwerp
Yekaterina Chzhen, editor
Social and Economic Policy Specialist, UNICEF Office of Research
Sudhanshu Handa, editor
Professor, Department of Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Brian Nolan, editor
Professor of Social Policy, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford
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