Introduction

Every second, about four children are brought into this world, and the lottery of birth will decide where they will be raised. Even for children who are lucky enough to begin their lives in the industrialised world, the financial circumstances of their families and the support that governments provide will decide what kind of diet, healthcare and education they will receive. Those who grow up in disadvantaged families are more likely to suffer unemployment, low pay, and poor health in adulthood and to transfer this poverty of opportunity to their own children. Thus, poverty can grind down generation after generation.

Breaking this cycle is one of the greatest challenges at the beginning of the 21st century. Despite high rates of economic growth and improvements in the standard of living in industrialised nations throughout the 20th century, a significant percentage of the children in these nations are still living in families that are so poor that normal health and growth are at risk. While the postwar welfare states have in most industrialised nations been hugely successful in reducing poverty among older people, this has not been the case for younger people. On the contrary, in recent decades we have seen the reemergence of high levels of child poverty in several western countries such as the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US).

If high economic growth rates, staggering improvements in the average standard of living, and the development of comprehensive welfare state programmes in the past 50 years were not able to eradicate child poverty in industrialised nations, shouldn’t we just accept the problem as being inevitable? Our findings lead us to say no. If industrialised nations had considered the problem of impoverishment in old age as being inevitable, so many wouldn’t have been so successful in reducing it. A century ago previous generations of citizens, business leaders and politicians in these countries decided that impoverishment in old age was socially unacceptable and not economically sound. They decided to introduce old age insurance programmes for salaried workers and, in the vast majority of industrialised nations, similar social insurance programmes were implemented in order to cover other contingencies such as sickness, disability and unemployment, which posed similar risks to economic well-being.