According to the report "Portugal, Social Balance 2023", authored by Susana Peralta, Bruno P. Carvalho and Miguel Fonseca, from Nova School of Business & Economics, and which is presented today, "children are one of the most vulnerable population groups to situations of poverty and social exclusion".

"The poverty risk rate among children decreased between 2021 and 2022 (from 20.4% to 18.5%), so there are still more than 302 thousand poor children in Portugal", the report reads.

However, economist Susana Peralta warned, "in the absence of any social transfer, without pensions, without family allowance, without social insertion income, the poverty rate among children would be 30%".

"Therefore, there would be practically one in three who would be poor", he stressed, in statements to Lusa, adding that this would mean more than 493 thousand poor children.

"One in three is a lot of child poverty, which means that there is something we are not doing well", he argued.

Susana Peralta pointed out two reasons why families with children are the ones most likely to be poor, namely the fact that one or more children in the household condition the participation of adults in the labour market and, on the other hand, because the same monthly income is now divided by more people.

He therefore defended more social transfers aimed at families, since children do not generate income.

He stressed that the fact that a child is born and raised in a poor family generates mechanisms for intergenerational transmission of poverty and this has an impact on people's ability to "solidify their skills" which, later, gives them success or not in their school career and in the labour market.

"This is problematic. It means that we should have a social state much more directed at children. Not only from the point of view of income, but also from the point of view of housing conditions because we have seen that children live in situations of greater housing deprivation", he defended.

On the other hand, he denounced the inequality in access to crèches and pre-school education, since almost seven out of ten poor children cannot get a place, a reality that "makes Portugal a very special case in the context of the European Union".

According to the economist, the few places in crèches are "being used disproportionately by the richest families" and this "is, in fact, completely absurd" because "it should be exactly the opposite".

He stressed that this assessment does not yet take into account the "Creche Feliz" programme, which brought free crèche for children born from 1 September 2021.

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