In many countries, children are more likely to be at risk of poverty than are senior citizens
Our authors express serious concern about the gap between young and old. Children and youth up to 18 years of age suffer from higher at-risk of-poverty rates than do people above 65 in 27 of the 41 EU and OECD countries. In some cases, this difference is quite significant. Interestingly, this finding also applies to countries with generally strong social-security systems.
In Sweden, for example, the at-risk-of-poverty rate among children and youth, at 12.3 percent, is more than twice as high as that among senior citizens (4.8 percent). In Norway, children and youth show at-risk-of-poverty rates (7.2 percent) more than six times higher than those among people of retirement age (1.2 percent). However, our authors also note that old-age poverty remains a widespread problem in many EU and OECD countries. In this regard, governments face the challenge of providing social security for older people while at the same time making their national pension systems sustainable. Here too, many countries are lagging significantly, and risk passing on major financial burdens to younger and future generations.
Our authors are also critical of climate and environmental policies that they say are too tentative, for example in the case of renewable energy sources.