Spain sees child poverty grow 28.5% since 2008

 

A report by UNICEF has found that child poverty in Spain has surged by 28.5% since 2008.

In the study, titled 'Children of Recession', which investigated 41 western countries, it was revealed how Spain jumped from 28.2% in 2008 to 36.3% in 2013, finding that Spain was one of the hardest hit countries along with Croatia, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Ireland and Portugal.

According to a similar report by Oxfam titled "Even it Up: Time to End Extreme Inequality", the richest 1.0% of Spaniards have as much wealth as 70% of the rest of the population.

The report also says the number of billionaires around the world doubled to 1,645 as of March 2014, from 793 in March 2009, demonstrating that the rich actually benefited from the economic crisis.

Likewise, the OECD has found that Spain is one of the countries where inequality between rich and poor grew the most during the crisis, according to its Society at a Glance 2014 report.

Between 2007 and 2010, the income of the poorest 10% of the population of Spain fell 14.0%, while of the other OECD countries it only dropped more than 5.0% in Mexico, Greece, Ireland, Estonia and Italy, and did not surpass more than 10% in any other country.

Of every 100 children at risk of poverty in Spain, 25 are in the region of Andalusia, 15 are in Catalonia in the northeast, 10 are in Valencia in the east and 10 are in Madrid and the rest of the autonomous communities, according to INE figures cited by the report Boys and girls, the most vulnerable in all of the autonomous communities, by the organization Educo.

The new UNICEF study warns that 2.6 million children have fallen into poverty as a result of the economic crisis in the most affluent countries, bringing the total number of poor children in the industrialised North to 76.5 million.

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* Spain 2nd highest inequality in the EU : Oxfam

* 12.3% of working Spaniards under poverty line