More than nine out of ten children who grew up in a low-income family were no longer at risk of living in poverty in their own household 25 years later. This is according to a study published Thursday by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). The study looked at children who lived in poverty in 1995 and their situation 25 years later, in 2020. Only 9.6 percent of the children surveyed run the risk of living in poverty later on. In total, almost 5.5 percent of the inhabitants of the Netherlands in 2021 and 2020 lived in a household with a low income.
Many of the children studied transcended the position of their parents. In particular, children of parents who had the very lowest income in 1995 made a lot of progress on average, while children of parents who earned a lot have mainly deteriorated over the past 25 years.
For a family with two children, a low income in 2021 means that the income will be a maximum of 2,170 euros per month. In 1995 that was 1,320 euros. Savings are not counted by Statistics Netherlands.
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The risk of inheriting parental poverty was slightly higher for migrants, the figures show. Of the children born abroad from a low-income family, 14 percent ran the risk of living in poverty themselves later on. Children with one or two parents born abroad were also more likely to inherit their parents’ poverty; especially when both parents were born abroad.
Of the five largest origin groups in the Netherlands, Moroccan Dutch who grow up in a low-income family ran the highest risk of also living in poverty later in life. This was least among the Indonesian Dutch, and the risk of inheriting poverty was relatively small even with parents who are both of Dutch descent.