The unacceptable threat

Although the eradication of child poverty is a top concern for European governments, consensus has not been reached on how this goal could be achieved: welfare regimes propose different policy solutions and researchers propose different measures and theories. In the meantime, at the dawn of the third millennium, European children''s lives are still threatened by risks of poverty and social exclusion. In so far as we consider poverty not only as a socio- demographic attribute but as the outcome of a complex generative mechanism, studying child poverty is a challenging task. Child poverty is a part of individuals'' biography, but also the outcome of interactions with other individuals, institutions or groups within a social context. This book presents some theoretical ingredients for the analytic approach to the study of child poverty and the trends of macro indicators of national wealth, social protection expenditure and income inequalities, child poverty incidence, intensity and persistency and child poverty risks at the individual level, using data from EUROSTAT and from the European Community Household Panel, between the mid-1990s and 2000.