2026-04-17T07:47:47Zhttps://recercat.cat/oai/request

oai:recercat.cat:10230/712972025-10-01T02:15:30Zcom_2072_6col_2072_452952

00925njm 22002777a 4500 dc Arcarons, Albert F. author Lanau Sanchez, Alba author Marí-Klose, Pau author Muñoz-Comet, Jacobo author 2025-09-30T06:22:46Z 2025-09-30T06:22:46Z 2025 Southern and Eastern European countries have historically had high child poverty rates. In the case of Spain, child poverty rates for migrant origin children, a growing population group, have remained among the highest across EU-27 countries in the last decades. Despite wide recognition among both researchers and policy makers of the scale of the problem, the factors explaining the poverty gap between migrant and native origin children remain under-researched. Applying the theoretical framework of ethnic penalties to the study of child poverty and using pooled data from the Spanish Survey on Income and Living Conditions, we explore the factors associated with the poverty penalty for three migrant origin groups of children–Ecuadorian, Moroccan, and Romanian– defined based on their parents’ country of birth. Decomposition analysis results show the poverty penalty to be highest for Moroccan origin children, followed by Romanian and Ecuadorian. Our models account for a large amount of the observed gross poverty penalties, particularly in the case of Ecuadorian origin children for whom we are able to explain it in full. The household labour market position and parental educational attainment emerge as key explanatory factors, although we do observe substantial differences in the relative weight of risk factors across groups. These findings have important policy implications and make the case for the incorporation of an understanding of migrant origin differences into the child poverty agenda. We gratefully acknowledge funding for the research project MiCyclo, which aims to improve knowledge about the migration cycle in Spain, from the National Research Agency of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. Grant agreement: PID2020-114702RA-I00. We also thank the employees of the Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE) for their collaboration during the data request process and colleagues for their comments on previous versions of this article in the different conferences and seminars we have presented it. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/71297 Child poverty Migrant origin Risk factors Poverty penalty Decomposition analysis Spain Migrant origin children and child poverty in Spain: a decomposition analysis