Abstract
This article for first time explores the relationship between immigration and poverty in Spain. Using recent Spanish household surveys, it is found, first, that both moderate and severe poverty are more acute among immigrants than among nationals and social transfers play no substantial role in reducing monetary deprivation in the case of foreign-born population; in the second place, we perform an econometric analysis that shows that the different poverty risk faced by local and immigrant households is not driven by differences in basic household and demographic characteristics.
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Notes
Three decades ago, at the height of its intensity, Spain had up to 3 million workers abroad (from a population of 34 millions) and around 10% of imports were financed with their remittances (Oporto del Olmo 1992). The impact of the economic crisis of 1973 in the host countries, and the modernization and development experienced by the Spanish economy since then reduced greatly, almost eliminating, the emigration of Spaniards workers abroad.
The SLC also includes longitudinal data for the period 2004–2007; unfortunately, the panel is rotating and in 2007 there are only a quarter of the households initially surveyed.
Note that immigrants from Bulgaria and Romania, which are two of the most important foreign population groups in Spain, are still included in the immigrant group, as these two countries joined the European Union later.
As it is well-known, the OECD-modified equivalence scale, first proposed by Hagenaars et al. (1994), computes the adult-equivalent household size assigning a value of 1 to the household head, of 0.5 to each additional adult member and of 0.3 to each child aged 14 or less years old.
At this respect, one has to keep in mind that we are not assuming any refined behavioural counterfactual, an approach usually reserved for the analysis of very concrete government interventions. Although this strategy obviously yields non-realistic for the case of pensions (that is, in absence of pensions, it is quite likely that other sorts of familiar or private transfers would operate), it helps to illustrate the central role of pensions in the Spanish Welfare State, as showed in the main body of the article.
These calculations, based on SLC 2004 and national household surveys carried out around 2004, are available on request. See Muñoz de Bustillo and Antón (2007) for details.
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Acknowledgments
A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 9th World Economy Meeting hold in Madrid in April 2007. Very helpful comments from Branko Milanovic on a first draft are gratefully acknowledged.
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Muñoz de Bustillo, R., Antón, JI. From Rags to Riches? Immigration and Poverty in Spain. Popul Res Policy Rev 30, 661–676 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-011-9205-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-011-9205-6