Almost a third of children under 16 in Spain live below the relative poverty line. They have been there for two decades. Transfers need to be more effective, but they are not enough: the key lies in what happens with work within households.
In Spain, there are 6.87 million children under 16. Of these, almost three out of ten (29.6%) live in households whose income does not exceed 60% of the national median, which is equivalent to more than two million children in relative poverty. If the threshold is narrowed to 40% of the median, the percentage of children below the threshold is 12.4%, the highest among all age groups.
Also high in the European context. The gap between the poverty rate for children under 15 and that for the general population is almost nine percentage points, only surpassed by Romania in the entire EU. In Finland, Denmark, or Slovenia, the relationship is reversed: children are less exposed than the average. Here, being a child multiplies the risk.
But what is truly worrying is that, in addition to being high, Spanish child poverty is persistent. It has been stuck around 27-30% for more than a decade and a half. Neither the Great Recession worsened it too much (because it was already high), nor did the subsequent recovery improve it. It rises with crises and does not fall with recoveries.
The intergenerational contrast puts it into perspective. Since 2007, poverty among those over 65 fell by nine percentage points. For those under 16, it rose by almost two. For young people aged 16 to 29, it rose by more than three. Pensions acted as a shield. We have built nothing comparable for children.
Transfers are undoubtedly necessary to get out of this hole. The Minimum Living Income (Ingreso Mínimo Vital) was a significant step, but it still doesn’t reach a large part of those who need it: Airef documents that most eligible households don’t even apply for it. Improving its reach is urgent. But transfers alone will not solve a rate entrenched near 30%. To understand why, we need to look at what happens with work within households.
The Living Conditions Survey allows measuring the work intensity of each household: what proportion of the total time that active-age parents could work, they actually work. A household with both parents working full-time all year has an intensity of 100%; one where only one of the two works half-time for six months is below 25%, because part-time counts as half. When this intensity does not reach 25%, 76% of children are poor. Between 25% and 50%, it drops to 53%. Between 50% and 75%, it falls to 23%. Only above 75% does it reduce to 10%.
But incidence by segment is one thing, and how much of the total falls into each is another. The most problematic step is the 25-50% intensity, which concentrates 41.5% of all children in poverty: about 843,000 children in households where work is done, but intermittently or partially. Only 26% of poor children live in households with intensity below 25%. The central problem is not total inactivity, but partiality and intermittency.
If we disaggregate by sex, it becomes clear where the deficit lies. In households with child poverty, men work around 72% of the possible time. Women, barely 30%. Child poverty is a problem of insufficient work in the household in general, but especially of insufficient labor participation by mothers.
And if with two adults, insufficient intensity already generates child poverty, with only one, the initial problem is that there is a single salary, if any. 48% of children in single-parent households are in relative poverty, compared to 26% in couples with two or more children and 18% in couples with one.
Single parents in households with child poverty work the equivalent of 47.9% of the year: 4.4 months full-time and 2.6 months part-time. Those not in poverty reach 88.4%, with 9.9 months full-time employment. The difference lies in the months of full-time employment. And four out of five single-parent households are headed by women (a proportion that seems to be accentuated in poverty, although the sample requires caution), so the intensity deficit is concentrated here with particular severity.
So the agenda against child poverty is, to a large extent, an employment agenda. The biggest lever is intensity. For this, 0-3 early childhood education that covers demand where it is lacking (especially in households with fewer resources), school hours that function as real work-life balance, and active employment policies that truly work for adults with dependent children would be useful.
But there is also a floor that intensity does not solve: as seen in the first table, even above 75%, one in ten children remains poor. These are about 330,000 children (16.3% of all children in poverty) in households where people work quite a lot, but earn little. Spain is the third country in the EU for poverty among the employed. The weight of intensity is much greater, but this floor of insufficient wages also needs a response.
And this floor of working poverty that persists at high intensity also requires action on job quality: vocational training oriented towards the lower end of the wage distribution. These are dispersed pieces that need a common strategy. The objective: that transfers, necessary today and probably always to some extent, become less and less so, and that the dilemmas we face today between reach and expenditure, between effectiveness and efficiency, weigh less because more households are sustained by their own work. Transfers provide a floor. But employment raises the roof.
