EU, one in five people born poor remains poor, in Italy one in three

Brussels – To be a child within a family with economic straits and difficulty getting by, and to become an adult who remains at risk of poverty: It is the phenomenon known as “inter-generational transmission of economic disadvantages“, still widespread in the EU and Italy. Eurostat tries to take a census of how many once-minor men and women between the ages of 25 and 59 have managed to transform childhood deprivation into affluent adulthood. The result is that one in five people in the EU continues to fail. Twenty per cent of those who said they lived in a financially poor household, now that they are grown up, continue to be in the same difficult situation. 

The Eurostat figure is updated to 2023, and it shows a social elevator problem that is missing almost everywhere but particularly nonexistent in Bulgaria, Romania, and Italy. They are the main EU countries where those born poor remain poor. This is true for 48.1 per cent, 42.1 per cent, and 34 per cent, respectively, of those who, at less than 14 years of age, were living in financial straits or even at risk of poverty and who, once they grew up, inherited the same problem as their parents. From the snapshot taken by the European Statistical Institute emerge the difficulties and contradictions of the eurozone’s third-largest economy and Europe’s second-largest manufacturer. A G7 country where one in three people are born poor and remain poor. 

In these dynamics, access to education seems to play a role. The risk of poverty is higher for those children whose mothers and fathers have lower educational qualifications compared to their now-adult peers who, at an early age, had parents with a bachelor’s degree or even a postgraduate master’s degree. “In most of the EU,” Eurostat notes, “in 2023, the at-risk-of-poverty rate for people aged 25-59 was 10.6 percentage points lower for those whose parents had a higher level of education (8.5 per cent) than for those whose parents had a lower level of education (19.1 per cent).