Galloway, Taryn Ann, Bjorn Gustafsson, Peder J. Pedersen, and Torun Osterberg. ‘Immigrant Child Poverty–The Achilles Heel of the Scandinavian Welfare State’. Measurement of Poverty, Deprivation, and Economic Mobility, Eds. Thesia I. Garner and Kathleen S. Short, Research on Economic Inequality, vol. 23, 2015, 185–219.
Immigrant and native child poverty in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden 1993-2001 is studied using large sets of panel data. While native children face yearly poverty risks of less than 10 percent in all three coun-tries and for all years studied the increasing proportion of immigrantchildren with an origin in middle- and low-income countries have poverty risks that vary from 38 up to as much as 58 percent. At the end of the observation period, one third of the poor children in Norway and as high as about a half in Denmark and in Sweden are of immigrant origin. The strong overrepresentation of immigrant children from low- and middle-income countries when measured in yearly data is also found when apply-ing a longer accounting period for poverty measurement. We find that child poverty rates are generally high shortly after arrival to the new country and typically decrease with years since immigration. Multivariate analysis shows that parents years since immigration andeducation affect risks of the number of periods in persistent poverty.