Children of Austerity Impact of the Great Recession on Child Poverty in Rich Countries

Bea Cantillon, Director, Hermand Deleeck Centre for Social Policy, University of Antwerp,Yekaterina Chzhen, Social and Economic Policy Specialist, UNICEF Office of Research,Sudhanshu Handa, Professor, Department of Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,Brian Nolan, Professor of Social Policy, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford

Bea Cantillon is Professor of Social Policy and Director of the Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy at the University of Antwerp. She has acted as a consultant to, among others, the OECD, the European Commission, and the Belgian government. Next to being the Chair of the National Administration for Family Allowances, she also served as a Belgian senator (1995-1999) and she was the president of the National Reform Commission on the Belgian Social Security for independent workers (2000-2002). She is secretary-general of the Foundation for International Studies on Social Security and coordinator of FP7 funded ImPRovE project. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Belgian Academy and a member of the Belgian High Council for Employment and of the commission on pension reform 2020-2040. Among her recent publications are Social Federalism: The Creation of a Layered Welfare State (with P. Popelier N. Mussche, Intersentia, 2011) and Reconciling Work and Poverty Reduction (with F. Vandenbroucke, OUP, 2014).

Yekaterina Chzhen specializes in comparative social policy, focusing on the interplay between government policies and individual level outcomes, such as poverty, deprivation, and labour market participation. She currently leads UNICEF's Innocenti Report Card series on child well-being in OECD countries and is also part of the team studying multidimensional child poverty. She joined the Unicef Office of Research - Innocenti in February 2013 after two and a half years as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Quantitative Methods in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Oxford (Nuffield College). She completed her PhD in Social Policy & Economics at the University of York in 2010.

Sudhanshu Handa is an economist specializing in poverty, human resources, and public policy. Over the last seven years he has led several large-scale evaluations of national cash transfer programs in sub-Saharan Africa as part of the Transfer Project. Recently he has been part of the research team on UNICEF's Innocenti Report Card which assesses the status of child poverty and well-being in OECD countries. His previous positions include Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Professor of Agricultural Economics at the Eduardo Mondlane University, and Social Development Specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Toronto and his BA in Political Economy from the Johns Hopkins University.

Brian Nolan is Director of the Employment, Equity and Growth Programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Oxford Martin School, Professor of Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College Oxford. His main areas of research are income inequality, poverty, and the economics of social policy. He has contributed to a wide range of comparative studies on poverty, income inequality, social indicators and social policies, tax and transfer policies, the labour market, the minimum wage, and health inequalities and health economics.

1. Introduction: Scope and Methods, Yekaterina Chzhen, Sudhanshu Handa, Bea Cantillon, and Brian Nolan
2. Impact of the Economic crisis on Children in Rich Countries, Yekaterina Chzhen, Brian Nolan, Bea Cantillon, and Sudhanshu Handa
3. Belgium: Creeping Vulnerability of Children, Julie Vinck, Wim Van Lancker, and Bea Cantillon
4. Child Poverty during the Recession in Germany, Thomas Bahle and Peter Krause
5. The Impact of the Great Recession on Child Poverty in Greece, Manos Matsaganis
6. Children in the Economic Crisis: Hungary, Andras Gabos and Istvan Gyorgy Toth
7. Children in the Economic Crisis: Ireland, Brian Nolan and Bertrand Maitre
8. The Impact of the Great Recession on Child Poverty: The Case of Italy, Luisa Natali and Chiara Saraceno
9. Children in the Economic Crisis: Japan, Aya K. Abe
10. Children in the Great Recession: Spain, Sara Ayllon
11. Sweden: Child Poverty during Two Recessions, Jan O. Jonsson and Carina Mood
12. Impact of the Recession on Children in the United Kingdom, Jonathan Bradshaw, Yekaterina Chzhen, and Gill Main
13. USA Child Poverty: The Impact of the Great Recession, Christopher Wimer and Timothy Smeeding
14. Learning the Lessons: Enhancing Capacity to Protect Children, Brian Nolan, Bea Cantillon, Sudhanshu Handa, and Yekaterina Chzhen