For Sweden, the results from the decomposition analysis (figure 5 and table 2) confirm the descriptive findings in figure 3 that prevalence effects are not the main driver for the rise in single-mother poverty. France, Germany (the Federal Republic), Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.8 We use multiple regression analyses to examine the . Alm etal. In the present study we addressed this issue by investigating the impact of child benefits on the poverty risk of single mothers in 15 European countries. As shown by previous studies, countries differ in how risk factors (e.g. You can apply for maternity benefit seven weeks before your due date, at the earliest. Hogendoorn, B., T. Leopold, and T. Bol. Educational qualifications are considered according to the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED 1997) and merged into three categories: low education (ISCED levels 1 and 2); medium education (levels 3 and 4), and high education (levels 5 and 6). These opposing trends could contribute to single mothers more or less stable poverty rates over time. A change is emerging: the generation of young fathers would like to spend more time with their children and be more involved in their upbringing. On the other hand, there are no substantially or statistically significant poverty-enhancing penalty-effects. Research on single mothers in Sweden has also not commonly focused on social composition as an explanation for socioeconomic disadvantage. In this paper, we built on the framework of Brady etal. However, this . First, looking at prevalence effects, these contributed to explaining changes in single-mother poverty in Sweden and the United Kingdom, but not so much in Germany. More specifically, the labor market policy reforms in 20032005 included elements with direct bearing for single mothers. 39 percent of single parent families are dependent on social benefits. A recent Forsa survey commissioned by the government found that single mothers . However, it can also be used in couples with a severe male factor or no production of sperm. What is Buy to Let (Rent Out) Investment and How Does it Work? Effects of Training and Workfare for Lone Mothers Receiving Means-Tested Benefits in Germany, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Are All Single Mothers the Same? how strongly they are associated with poverty) on the other. And respectively, the penalty effect would be: How much would single mothers poverty have changed between period 1 and period 2, if only the association of unemployment with poverty had changed as we observed in that time-span? Full-time employment is considered as working 35 and more hours per week or >75% FYFTE. The prerequisite for this is that the offspring is in training and has not yet moved out. Germany ranks relatively well with regard to education levels. For single mothers, who must play the role of mother and father both, this is a challenging task that sometimes can be tough. In contrast, being highly educated seems to prevent poverty even better in the late 2000s than in the early 2000s. Here, both prevalence and penalty effects contribute to explaining single-mother poverty trends. Introduction Although single parent families are, historically speaking, not a new occurrence, the social conditions for single parenting have changed considerably. This is why there are a large number of state aids aimed at promoting families. Overall, penalty effects seem to be more decisive than composition effects in Germany, but none of these reaches statistical significance. 2012). If the living conditions change, this must also be communicated to the tax office. in the 1990s. But they do . Hence, marginal employment is measured as 115 weekly hours or <40% FYFTE. (2017) distinguish between the prevalence of risk factors for poverty (i.e. But the comparative design also allows us to consider which type of explanation is most suitable where and when. This type of decomposition analyses comes along with further challenges. LIS Working Paper Series. The continuing increase in single-mother poverty between 20002004 and 20052009 can only partially be explained by our model. Sibling Bonus! In the United Kingdom, poverty reduction is low at about 20%pts. If the parent-guardian finds a new partner, there is no longer a right to a discharge. Diverging Trends in Single-Mother Poverty across Germany, Sweden, and The evidence supports Hypothesis 1a: employment did not increase among single mothers in the observed time frame and therefore there was no prevalence-effect. Ideal-typical formulations of welfare state regimes could explain the situation as observed in the 1990s (Esping-Andersen 1990): high single-mother poverty in the liberal welfare state of the United Kingdom, low in social-democratic Sweden and an intermediate level of poverty in conservative Germany. In Germany, in most years, monetary social benefits reduce single-mother poverty by between 10 percentage points (%pts.) Except for the temporary decrease in 19951999 (when nonemployment increased), there was little change in these shares over time. As such, this study bridges different research fields for a more comprehensive view of single mothers' position across Europe. July is the month with the highest birth rate in Germany? Elterngeldis funded by the federal tax system and replaced, on January 01, 2007, the pre-existingErzeihungsgeldor Parenting Allowance. Rather, the different factors explain poverty trends of single mothers to varying degrees across countries, and hence they should be considered in conjunction. Sweden, by contrast, saw a dramatic increase in single mothers poverty, although risk factors (like low education, young age or very young children) have become less prevalent over time. The calculation is based on an average net amount of the applicants last three, complete, monthly paychecks or the last 13 weeks of pay before the Maternity Protection Period started and divided by total days for period being measured. Poverty trends (19912014) in Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom by family type. TheMutterschaftsgeld, (maternity allowance) amount will vary from case to case as it is based on existing employment pay. The Best Countries for Mothers - Insider She currently works at the Berlin State Commission on preventing child and family poverty (within the Berlin state administration). For example, trends in Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom contradict established welfare regime logics: single-mother poverty rates more or less stagnated at around 30 percent with a slight increase in Germany, while they saw a strong increase from just above 10 percent in the early 1990s to over 30 percent by 2015 in Sweden, and sharply decreased from over 60 percent in the 1990s to just under 30 percent in 2014 in the United Kingdom (see figure 1). The maximum daily payment issued from the State Health Insurers is capped at 13 EURO per day. Two key mechanisms by which policies affect poverty among single mothers are through providing income support and by supporting employment. This is topped up by your employer, if you have one. Section 8 Program for single mothers. We define our dependent variable as relative income poverty, which is measured according to the EU at-risk-of-poverty definition: A household is at risk of being poor if its disposable income is less than 60% of the national median equivalized2 household income. Why many Germans do not become parents until late in life, and how families are supported by the state. Alabama offers various benefit programs for single moms, providing vital support to these families during challenging times. Conceptually, both studies have great similarities with the GSOEP. Known as a 'New Deal for Lone Parents', part of the new social policy aims specifically at the group of single mothers, and concentrates its activation efforts on integrating them in the labour market, in response to the prevailing situation where lone mothers show a very low labour participation rate and - mirroring that - a high dependence on . Following Haupt and Nollmann (2014), we choose a typical profile of the characteristics, because the omitted categories cannot be differentiated from the intercepts in the compared models. These findings are in line with Hypotheses 1b and 2b. Further, Germany saw several family policy reforms since the 1990s, which affected single mothers. Evidence from British and West German Womens Employment Trajectories. The question of how to safeguard the economic status of single mothers in a context of increasing dual earnership is a crucial one. Your employer can then have their contribution to the maternity benefit allowance reimbursed by your health insurance company, as well as the employer's contributions to statutory health insurance, pension insurance, and unemployment insurance. Incidentally, this also applies if the newcomer is your best friend. until 2000) among the three countries. There are a lot of moving parts in both programs involving amount of hours worked; amount of time off desired by both parents; amount and length of the payments; coordinating the leave times with the employer and other factors. The benefit of using register data is that income data are registered with great levels of precision and (in Sweden) validity, and that it is possible to calculate sampling weights (related to the survey part of the data), which achieve a high level of representativeness. This points to high social selectivity of single motherhood in that period, which decreased again in the late 1990s-early 2000s and remained stable afterwards (50%). However, with the New Deal policies (in particular the introduction of a national minimum wage and work tax credits) single-mother poverty is reduced by about 30%pts. (Elterngeld), Tips on deductible costs & plausibility check, Receive an average tax refund of 1,095 euros, Try it out for free & only submit if you're fully satisfied, There is a right to child benefit or child allowance. In particular, we used a three-fold decomposition, which decomposes differences between two groups or two time points regarding an outcome of interest into three parts (Jann, 2008; for an application, see: Hogendoorn, Leopold & Bol, 2020): the effect of changes in the prevalence of risk factors, the effect of changes in the penalties associated with those risk factors, and an interaction term that assesses the joint impact of changes in prevalences and penalties. Parents who work part-time after the birth of their children can now extend the entitlement period: one Elterngeld month becomes two ElterngeldPlus months. Have a look at our list of German tax consultants, advisors and accountants for expats. The program is also beneficial for the self-employed by allowing them to work up to 30 hours a week while collecting the benefit over a longer period of time. We conceptualize individual and contextual explanations for time trends in single-mother poverty, building on a framework developed by Brady, Finnigan and Hbgen (2017). Decomposition analyses are a well-established method in poverty research to investigate group differences or differences over time (Haupt and Nollmann 2014). In the United Kingdom, in turn, becoming a single mother was highly selective in the early 1990s and social policies discouraged single mothers employment. How Long is Elterngeld Paid? We now review prior research of how policy trajectories in Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom affected single mothers in the past three decades, in order to derive expectations about penalty effects on changes in single-mother poverty. In the German and the United Kingdom data, this distinction is based on weekly working hours, while it is measured as the percentage of the full-year full-time equivalent (FYFTE) in the Swedish data. z statistics in parentheses. Most single mothers cannot work their way out of poverty without the right kinds of supplemental support. The prerequisite is that the employee earns more than 450 a month. The steep rise in anchored poverty in 1991 reflects a data issue in the GSOEP due to German reunification and has no substantial meaning. In light of these developments, compositional changes among single mothers in the United Kingdom should have reduced poverty risks. The direct effect is often referred to as the poverty reduction associated with taxes and transfers (Huber, Stephens, Bradley, Moller, & Nielsen, 2009). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Family policy is education policy and should be designed to meet childrens needs. In this framework, poverty rates are understood to be the result of (a.) Although there has been a continuous increase in Germany (with a peak in the mid-2000s) and Sweden, immigrant single mothers became less prevalent in the United Kingdom between 1995 and 2004. Both the absolute level of benefits available to single mothers and their degree of targeting would affect the attractiveness (or the feasibility) of single motherhood. For the United Kingdom, we use data from the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) and its successor, the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) (University of Essex, NatCen Social Research, and Kantar Public 2019) covering 19912014. Ellingster, Anne Lise, and Arnlaug Leira. Policy-makers have been trying to make it easier for women and men to reconcile the two. This reform aimed at simplifying application procedures, increasing transparency, and reducing bureaucracy (Brewer, Browne, and Jin 2012), although the actual implementation was heavily criticized for not effectively protecting insecure and low-wage workers, and low-income families in general, against poverty (Millar and Bennett 2017). the share of unemployed in the group), whereas penalty effects identify the strength of the association of a characteristic and the outcome (e.g. Besides the average family model, there are also many single parents (1.6 million). (2017) show that policy reforms have widely been suspected to affect the prevalence of risk factors by encouraging (un)employment or young parenthood, but that evidence is weak. The variables required for the analyses in this article were available for the years 19902009. Second, penalty-effects mattered in each country, but in different ways. The Re-Militarization of Germany - The New York Times Other adults (such as her parents, siblings, etc.) Maternity benefit in Germany (Mutterschaftsgeld) Since 2013, every child has had a legal right to a kindergarten place from their first year. Basically, only one parent can apply for the relief amount (Entlastungsbetrag). Nov 10, 2022 The number of single parents housing underage children in Germany has been increasing with figures for single fathers amounting to 181 thousand in 2018. If you are privately-insured and you have taken out a daily sickness allowance insurance (Krankentagegeldversicherung), you might be entitled to receive a daily sickness allowance for the duration of your maternity leave, which replaces the maternity benefit from the statutory health insurance companies. 2023 All rights reserved to: How To Germany ApS. In Germany, corresponding to the descriptive analyses, the differences in poverty from one period to the other are rather small, between 7 and 4%pts. A full-time, year-round job at the minimum wage pays just over the poverty threshold for a family of two. Following this framework, we assumed that penalties in particular were related to changes in policies. Single parents with a child aged 12, and later with a child aged 5, were now obliged to work and were pushed out of the social assistance scheme (Daly 2010; Haux 2012). 2018). Education opportunities and welfare for children require strong families and good education institutions. Parental leave has been further extended. In Germany and Sweden, the income reference period is calendar years, while we had to use monthly income in the United Kingdom due to complete missing of this variable in 20062008. Sean Gallup/Getty Images The cost of giving birth in Germany is relatively low, around $2,500. Unfortunately, in the United Kingdom these variables are not available in the years 20062008. Contact your Health Insurance Company and your assigned agent at your local Unemployment Office in such cases. (19951999 and 20002004), the latter marking the period after New Deal was introduced. ElterngeldPlus - Partnership Bonus and More Flexibility Elterngeld is funded by the federal tax system and replaced, on January 01, 2007, the pre-existing Erzeihungsgeld or Parenting Allowance. For parents of children born from July 1, 2015 on, there is a variety of flexible leave times that can involve both parents. 7. Having a baby in Germany | Expatica The responsible authority for such cases is theBundesversicherungsamt,Mutterschaftsgeldstelle, German Insurance Office, Maternity Allowance department. Rental Furniture in Germany the Smart Alternative for Expats, Housing in Germany: What You Need to Know, 7 Differences Between Corporate Housing and Hotels, What you should know about Insurance BEFORE you arrive in Germany, Paying Medical Expenses/Health Insurance Claims in Germany It can get complicated, Using German Government Health Insurance (GKV), Health Insurance Options in Germany 2022, Supplemental Medical/Health Insurances (Zusatzversicherung) in Germany, Tips about German Statutory Health Insurance, Catalog Shopping, Online Shopping and TeleShopping in Germany. This is then topped up by your employer (see below). The relatively favorable economic position of single mothers in Sweden compared to other countries can be explained by the generous social security system, but also with their traditionally high employment rates. In a second step, we examine the changes in single mothers composition over time in Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The state grants lone parents a relief in income tax (Einkommensteuer). Here are three steps we can take to better support their efforts: Shore up wages and employer benefits. Which country has the highest child benefits available to - Euronews Changes in family demography are often considered as an individual explanation of trends in poverty, but the distinction between composition of risk factors and the associated poverty penalties demonstrates that these individual explanations need to be considered as inherently contextual. Similarly, between these two most recent periods, there has been an increase in the poverty penalty associated with nonemployment for single mothers in Germany. As the anchor, we take the relative poverty line in 1990/1991 and multiply this poverty line by the consumer-price index for the subsequent years. The majority of families nowadays describe their economic situation as being good or very good. To explain single-mother poverty, existing research has either emphasized individualistic, or contextual explanations. Deductions for children who are being educated in Germany or abroad (within limitations), who are older than 18, and living outside the parents' household amounting to EUR 924 per year. The lifetime risk of maternal death is one in 11,000. Our findings call for integrating perspectives of demographic and welfare state scholarship more for understanding poverty trends over time, and demonstrate the use of the prevalences and penalties framework for doing so. 2009; Hbgen 2018, 2019; Maldonado and Nieuwenhuis 2015; Misra, Budig, and Moller 2007; Misra etal. and 20%pts. There remains an information gap between the last BHPS wave (2008) and the first wave of the UKHLS (2009). For example, the 2012 reform of the child maintenance system strengthened nonresident fathers obligations to pay for the child. Prevalence, penalty and interaction effects on changes in single-mother poverty across five time periods 19902014, Prevalence, penalty, and interaction effects by single characteristicsGermany. All you have to do is click on one of the listedBundeslaenderand the first address that comes up is where you need to apply. Hypothesis 2c: The growth in single-mother poverty in the 1990s and 2000s in Sweden can party be explained by higher penalties associated with not being employed. Nevertheless, some sociodemographic risk factors (many children, never married, immigration) have become more prevalent. Please review the details and accept the service to see this content. Poverty rates of single mothers are commonly high, but vary strongly across industrialized countries (OECD 2021). They increased conditionality and introduced logics of labor market activation into the German unemployment benefit system. Single Mothers in Sweden: Work and Welfare in the Welfare State - JSTOR Panel G shows the trend in prevalences of never married single mothers in Germany and the United Kingdom only: Since the 1990s, never having been married became more common among single mothers to in both countries. In our comparison of successive time periods, we define the earlier period as the equilibrium and the later period as the deviation from this equilibrium due to change. Considered separately, both approaches fail to explain diverging trends in poverty among single mothers in different countries since the 1990s. The German social security system provides expectant and nursing mothers with maternity benefit to help make up for lost earnings. This also means that our expectations formulated in the hypotheses are not exclusive. However, a scenario is possible in which a larger proportion of single mothers falls into relative income poverty, even though they saw their incomes increasejust not enough to keep up with rising median household incomes. In conclusion, we found some support for individual-level and contextual-level explanations for poverty, but none applied universally or could single-handedly explain the diverging trends in single-mother poverty in Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. We assume this indicator picks up on (the effects of) partner alimony that exists in Germany and the United Kingdom, but not in Sweden. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. This paper investigates the role of economic factors in the determination of labour supply and welfare dependenceof lone mothers in Germany. For each multiple birth, 300 EURO per child issued. Further, educational attainment levels and single parents average age have actually increased. Nieuwenhuis, Rense, and Laurie C. Maldonado. Our findings support critiques of static welfare regime typologies, which are unable to account for policy change and poverty trends of single mothers. You Want To Watch And Hear How Our Sisters Have Turn Our Beautiful, Cute. The Foreign Bank Account Reporting Deadline is Approaching What You Need to Know! Policy reforms in these areas can affect poverty trends, for example by changing support for single mothers labor market participation or the level of transfers to which single mothers are eligible, either based on their family status or their labor market status. Though the majority of parents are married (5.5 million), it is no longer uncommon for unmarried couples to live together (843,000). What is a social security ID (Sozialversicherungsausweis / Rentenversicherungsausweis) and why do you need one in Germany? In Germany, the estate provides so-called "Elterngeld" to support young families. The main benefits are FDIC-approved loans, down payment assistance and first-time buying assistance. When assessing your income tax, the tax office ( Finanzamt) will compare the amount of child benefit you have already received to the amount you could save if the tax-free child allowance were granted to you. z statistics in parentheses. Instead of examining the effects of different risk factors for poverty in the population (i.e. We divide our observation window 19902015 into 5-year periods. E-mail: Search for other works by this author on: Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Alleinerziehende Mtter im Bereich des SGB II. Welfare State Retrenchment and Rising Poverty of Single-Adult Households in Sweden 19882011, Patterns of Institutional Change in Minimum Income Protection in Sweden and Germany, Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy, Wage Discrimination: Reduced Form and Structural Estimates, Armut von Familien Im Sozialen Wandel: Ausma, Strukturen, Ursachen, Targeting, Universalism, and Single-Mother Poverty: A Multilevel Analysis across 18 Affluent Democracies, Rethinking the Risks of Poverty: A Framework for Analyzing Prevalences and Penalties, Universal Credit: A Preliminary Analysis of its Impact on Incomes and Work Incentives, Lone-Parent Families in Europe: A Variety of Economic and Social Circumstances, Converging Worlds of Welfare? 10 years after the war . The years after New Deal policies were introduced (20002004) are characterized by a considerable further decrease of nonemployed or low educated single mothers. You can present this to your statutory health insurance provider and fill out an application form. Moreover, the association between residence in east Germany and poverty declined in the most recent period (20102014) compared to the preceding periods. Hence, compositional changes may not account for the striking increase in single-mother poverty over time here. Rental Furniture in Germany the Smart Alternative for Expats, Housing in Germany: What You Need to Know, 7 Differences Between Corporate Housing and Hotels, What you should know about Insurance BEFORE you arrive in Germany, Paying Medical Expenses/Health Insurance Claims in Germany It can get complicated, Using German Government Health Insurance (GKV), Health Insurance Options in Germany 2022, Supplemental Medical/Health Insurances (Zusatzversicherung) in Germany, Tips about German Statutory Health Insurance, Catalog Shopping, Online Shopping and TeleShopping in Germany. Although there was a considerable decrease in nonemployment in the subsequent periods, the share (42%) was still twice as high as in Sweden in the 2000s. As shown in table 1, the associations between poverty and part-time employment increased significantly between the early and the late 1990s, and again between 20052009 and 20102014. We compare the post-government poverty rate, which is based on all income sources including social benefits and taxes, to a hypothetical market poverty rate, which excludes taxes and social benefits. If you are an employee but not a member of a statutory health insurance scheme (i.e. There are no exceptions in this regard. The second address is for applicants complaints. For each characteristic considered in the analysis a prevalence effect, a penalty effect and the corresponding interaction is calculated based on counterfactuals. Here the ElterngeldPlus, like the previous Elterngeld, replaces the loss in income by 65 to 100 percent. Our findings reveal that no single type of explanation suffices to explain these poverty trends, and that a combination of perspectives is required: The prevalences of individual-level characteristics (social composition) were responsible for changes in single-mother poverty in Sweden and the United Kingdom, but not in Germany. Maternity pay is intended to compensate working mothers for loss of earnings during their maternity period. For future research, this importantly brings the relative position of a risk group into focus as an additional type of explanation for poverty: not only should the demographic composition and policy benefits of a risk group be considered, but also of the rest of the population. Building on the prevalences and penalties framework, it further matters how much risk factors are associated with poverty. In the United Kingdom, the slight decrease in poverty from the first to the second period can be attributed to favorable changes in single mothers social composition. Single mothers were often lacking characteristics that favor their success in the labor market, even despite their higher likelihood to be in education compared to mothers in couples (Ellingster and Leira 2006). How families live in Germany: facts at a glance - deutschland.de The Germans have adopted a clause based on the Scandinavian system which allows for both parents to exercise their right to time off with their new born and to receiveElterngeld, too by sharing the allocated Elterngeldtime (12-14 months total). This article examines the situation of single mothers and their families in Sweden, the country acknowledged to be the most advanced welfare state.
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