What helps households with children in leaving poverty? Evidence from Spain

Abstract

In this paper we analyse the distinct effectiveness of demographic, labour market and welfare state transfers events in promoting exits from deprivation for childbearing households in Spain, a Southern European Country with high and persistent child poverty and a familial welfare regime. We undertake a thorough analysis of outflow rates and of the effect of events on them by household types using a detailed descriptive approach and a multivariate analysis to control for household heterogeneity. We find that, contrary to the descriptive results, a multivariate approach to the estimation of the outflow rate shows that the presence of children robustly reduces household’s chances to step out of poverty. In turn, both methodologies show that the effectiveness of labour market events is somewhat lower for childbearing households while their prevalence is particularly high. Also, both the prevalence and the effectiveness of events related to the beginning of state transfers are high for households without children.children, poverty dynamics, outflow rate, Spain, trigger events.