Webinar: Child poverty in Ireland and the pandemic recession

Join the ESRI Tuesday, 7 July for the fourth in a series of webinars where our researchers discuss policy issues related to the upcoming Budget. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, this series of webinars replaces our planned Budget Perspectives Conference 2021. It is more important than ever that the ESRI continues releasing up-to-date research during this period of uncertainty and therefore we are committed to digital delivery of our annual conference. 

The subject of the webinar is the upcoming paper 'Child poverty in Ireland and the pandemic recession'. A presentation on Zoom will be followed by a Q and A session in which all attendees are encouraged to participate. For those who cannot attend, we will upload the webinar to our YouTube channel later that afternoon.

The paper itself will be available to read on our website that morning.

Paper abstract: The Irish experience of the Great Recession was characterised by a large increase in unemployment, little change in relative poverty measures but a large increase in basic deprivation. Children were most adversely affected by this rise in deprivation. We show that that from 2004 to 2018, parental employment and high household work intensity decrease the risk of a child living in poverty. In the face of widespread COVID-19 employment losses, we simulate how child income poverty rates will evolve over the course of 2020. Without an economic recovery, child income poverty rates could rise as high as 23 per cent, a one-third increase in the rate of child income poverty relative to the start of 2020. A partial economic recovery decreases the surge in child income poverty, with child income poverty rising to a maximum of 19 per cent, or a one-seventh increase in the rate of child income poverty relative to the start of 2020. We conclude that a partial economic recovery in the latter half of the year coupled with an extension of emergency income supports for the entirety of 2020 would bring child income poverty levels only moderately above the level they would have been in a counterfactual where COVID-19 related job losses did not occur (an increase of between one-eleventh and one-seventh).

A video of the webinar can be viewed below.