The vicious cycles perpetuating poverty and disadvantage across generations have enormous economic, social and environmental costs. Ending them is essential for a sustainable future. Above all this requires urgent and radical action to tackle the deep-seated inequalities causing child poverty.
The future wellbeing and indeed survival of increasing numbers of children across the world is more and more at risk. Already too many children are growing up in poverty and the perpetuation of poverty from one generation to the next is deeply entrenched.
Poverty disproportionately affects households with children: children are twice as likely to live in extreme poverty as adults. Globally, approximately 800 million children aged 0–18 years are subsisting below a poverty line of US $3.20 a day, and one billion children are experiencing multidimensional poverty, with multiple deprivations in the areas of health, nutrition, education or standards of living, including housing.
Child poverty and the Intergenerational Perpetuation of Poverty (IGPP) are now being compounded by the impact of climate change. Around one third of the world’s child population is living with the dual impacts of poverty and high climate risk. With the devastating effects of extreme weather destroying livelihoods and communities and leading to mass migration, more and more children are at risk. The current spate of heatwaves, megafires, deadly floods and landslides in many countries across the world is bringing the reality of the climate crisis to the doors of more and more children. It is no longer just a remote disaster that has been destroying lives and communities in many parts of the developing world and trapped them in poverty and a struggle for survival. It is now an existential threat to the future wellbeing of children in all countries, developed and developing.
The challenges posed by the climate crisis, the persistence of child poverty and the IGPP, are inextricably bound together and to tackle one we must tackle the others. They share a common origin: an economic system based on excessive consumption by some when others lack access to essential goods and services and cannot meet their basic needs, and the deeply unsustainable use of natural resources. Positive social change that will transform our societies and build an inclusive economy is vital to addressing these three challenges.
One of the keys to such a transformation and to building a sustainable future will be to tackle inequality and ensure real equality of opportunity for all. Above all, this will require intensifying action to end child poverty as this is essential to creating equality of opportunity for all and ending IGPP.
If we are to end child poverty and the IGPP we must start by asking ourselves why in a world of plenty there is a collective failure to eradicate poverty. We believe this is because we only rarely move beyond the symptoms to address the root causes, particularly in early childhood, of IGPP; because of the efforts of governments being obstructed, in particular as a result of mistaken beliefs concerning ‘merit’ and ‘incentives’; because of the self-interest of and exploitation by some who control excessive wealth and resources; and because of a failure to properly assess the costs to society of poverty and inequalities. For instance, the current failure to eradicate poverty imposes a huge cost on society. In a country such as the United States, child poverty costs over US$1 trillion annually, representing 5.4 per cent of its gross domestic product, taking into account the loss of economic productivity, greater health and crime expenses, and increased costs as a result of child homelessness and maltreatment. Investing in children, conversely, has considerable returns: for every dollar spent on reducing childhood poverty, seven dollars would be spared.
To break the vicious cycles that lead to IGPP and persistent child poverty, we should move beyond a reliance on the classic approach to poverty reduction based on economic growth combined with progressive taxation and social protection. We need to both strengthen our post-market redistribution mechanisms and put more emphasis on the pre-market mechanisms that cause social exclusion. This means building an inclusive economy: one that prevents exclusion rather than causing exclusion and compensating it post hoc.
In strengthening our post-market redistribution mechanisms, three priorities will be vital. First, mobilising increased resources to combat poverty by widening the tax base and implementing progressive tax policies. Second, strengthening social protection and protecting basic income security. Third, ensuring effective access for children to food, housing, sport, culture and leisure activities, childcare, education, healthcare and other key services.
What we need is a move from an extractive and exclusive economy to a regenerative and inclusive one. In particular, we believe that this will involve three things: i) advancing a jobs-rich model of development which makes the right to work a reality; ii) introducing a basic income for young adults; and iii) prohibiting discrimination on grounds of socioeconomic disadvantage.
Of course, the scale of economic, social and environmental changes required, essential though they are for all our futures, will not be easily achieved. We must place the goal of ending child poverty and IGPP at the heart of our economic and political systems and thus embed it in all our economic, social and environmental policies as well as in the systems for delivering them.
There is no excuse for the perpetuation of the vicious cycles that diminish life chances of children in poverty: we know the range of policies and actions that are needed to break them. Thus, given the damage that poverty does to people’s lives, to social cohesion, to the economy and to environmental sustainability, we can imagine no objective more urgent or worthwhile pursuing.
Olivier De Schutter is the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and Professor at UCLouvain, Belgium and SciencesPo, France.
Hugh Frazer is Adjunct Professor at Maynooth University, Ireland, a former Director of the Irish Government’s Combat Poverty Agency and an expert on European Union (EU) social policy and child poverty.
Anne-Catherine Guio is Senior Researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and ensured the scientific coordination of the first two EU’s Feasibility Studies for a ‘European Child Guarantee’.
Eric Marlier is International Scientific Coordinator at LISER and manages the 38-country ‘European Social Policy Analysis Network’ funded by the EU.
The Escape from Poverty, by Olivier De Schutter, Hugh Frazer, Anne-Catherine Guio and Eric Marlier, is available to read Open Access on Bristol University Press Digital.
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