To What Extent Are Greek Children Exposed to the Risk of a Lifelong, Intergenerationally Transmitted Poverty?

Abstract

Today Greece is confronted with an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Children of the recession live under conditions of poverty and deprivation. Within four years from the onset of crisis, child poverty rates almost doubled. Two out of five children are living below the poverty line (40.5 percent), whereas 23.2 percent are currently living in extreme material deprivation. Their families have parents who are jobless or “in‐work poor.” The Greek Orthodox Church delivers meals to over 500,000 people every day, as do municipal authorities either directly or by sustaining families’ nutrition through social food banks. Child poverty existed in unacceptably high rates even when other economic indicators, such as unemployment or pace of economic growth, were favorable. Thus, an already weak and inefficient welfare state could not buffer children when the financial crisis erupted. Unemployment has slightly (1 percent) receded for the first time in 2014, but still approximately 27 percent of the active population is jobless. Moreover, significant income losses make “in‐work poor” people unable to earn enough money for their living, especially when the family has one or two children. Briefly, 1,225,857 people are still being cast aside from the labor market, while 2,724,539 (35.7 percent) live under the “poverty line.” The risk that children already in family poverty will be unable to obviate the trap is real. To the emerging question “Could the state intervene through appropriate transmissions and avert the lifelong perspective?” we argue that, despite depletion of funds for social spending, public transmissions in general may avert this perspective if better targeted, and that policy responses in other countries have managed to protect children far better in comparison to Greece.