The Association between Early-Life Poverty and Adult Economic Status in Sweden from 1930 to 2015

Gabriel Brea-Martinez, Centre for Economic Demography-Economic History Lund University
Martin Dribe, Lund University
Maria Stanfors, Lund University

One of the most important features of welfare states, irrespective of orientation and scope, is to fight poverty. It is well-established that being poor during childhood increases the likelihood of being poor as an adult. We know much more about the present than about the past as extant research on the impacts of childhood poverty primarily cover the post-1960 period, and provide limited insights into the changing influence of poverty as societies modernize and welfare states are developed. We analyze the impacts of childhood poverty on economic outcomes of men and women growing up in Southern Sweden between the 1930s and the early 1970s and followed to adulthood between 1968 and 2015. Our preliminary results provide insights of the prevalence of childhood poverty during adult life. Interestingly, there is a gender dimension to this with childhood poverty effects being stronger and increasing over time for men but not for women, despite better access to education and higher-paying low qualification jobs for the former group. We show that the mediation effect of education is key to understand the long-term poverty impacts, from a gender perspective, where increasing levels of education had a greater equalizer effect among women than men. Furthermore, other sociodemographic factors as the role of family formation might have been important especially in the case of females. This indicates that childhood determinants should be assessed from a gender perspective and that we should look for gendered pathways when dealing with long-term effects of childhood poverty.

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 Presented in Session 151. Persistent Effects of Inequality and Deprivation