Migrant origin children and child poverty in Spain: a decomposition analysis

Abstract

Southern and Eastern European countries have historically had high child poverty rates. In the case of Spain, child poverty rates for migrant origin children, a growing population group, have remained among the highest across EU-27 countries in the last decades. Despite wide recognition among both researchers and policy makers of the scale of the problem, the factors explaining the poverty gap between migrant and native origin children remain under-researched. Applying the theoretical framework of ethnic penalties to the study of child poverty and using pooled data from the Spanish Survey on Income and Living Conditions, we explore the factors associated with the poverty penalty for three migrant origin groups of children–Ecuadorian, Moroccan, and Romanian– defined based on their parents’ country of birth. Decomposition analysis results show the poverty penalty to be highest for Moroccan origin children, followed by Romanian and Ecuadorian. Our models account for a large amount of the observed gross poverty penalties, particularly in the case of Ecuadorian origin children for whom we are able to explain it in full. The household labour market position and parental educational attainment emerge as key explanatory factors, although we do observe substantial differences in the relative weight of risk factors across groups. These findings have important policy implications and make the case for the incorporation of an understanding of migrant origin differences into the child poverty agenda.