International review of approaches to tackling child poverty: Denmark

Introduction

Denmark has some of the lowest child poverty rates in the European Union (EU) and the OECD. Based on EU statistics on income and living conditions (EU-SILC), 10% of children in Denmark were living in relative poverty (60% below 60% of the median income after social transfers and before housing costs (BHC)) in 2024 compared to an EU average of 19%.[3] By contrast, Scotland’s before housing cost child poverty rate for 2023/24 is almost double that of Denmark’s at 19% in 2023-24.^[4] Despite a slight upward trend during the 2010s, mostly as a result of welfare state restructuring, child poverty rates in Denmark have remained at a relatively low level (below 11%) since at least the late-1980s.[5] It is also notable that rates of poverty are lower for children than working-age adults, a relatively uncommon feature of poverty distribution among EU countries.^[6]

Reducing or preventing child poverty has not been an explicit focus of Denmark’s social policy; there has never been a child poverty strategy in Denmark. Rather, the Danish Government has often framed social policy in the language of ensuring equal opportunity for all children and addressing social exclusion.[7] This was formalised recently, with the current Government’s ‘Children First’ agenda leading to the implementation of the Danish Child's Act from 1^st January 2024 which aims to strengthen the rights of children in policy decision-making. The Act does place a specific focus on protecting children in a disadvantaged and vulnerable position, but without specifically mentioning poverty.[8]

As a result, most family and child policies in Denmark are provided on a universal basis, rather than targeted to groups in or at risk of poverty. However, this is not to say that additional barriers faced by some groups, such as single parents, are not recognised and targeted, but the framing of support is mostly focused on labour market participation and reducing the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.

More notably, Denmark only had an official definition and measure of poverty for a short window of time, between 2013 and 2015. In 2012, the centre-left Danish Government at the time established an Expert Commission on Poverty to explore different approaches to measuring poverty and develop a proposal for a Danish poverty indicator. The Commission published its report in April 2013 and an official Danish poverty measure was introduced based on its recommendation. The Danish poverty line was, in effect, a measure of persistent deep poverty: set at 50% of median income over three consecutive years, and it excluded students and individuals with net wealth (including housing but excluding pensions) of more than 100,000 Danish Krone (DKK).^[9] The Commission argued that adopting this measure was important to have popular and policy support in accordance with what is “ordinarily” considered poor in Denmark.[10] The measure was abolished in 2015 by a short-lived centre-right minority Government. Since then, Denmark has not had an official measure or definition of poverty.

In this case study we consider the key interventions and factors that have contributed to Denmark’s low child poverty rate, particularly those that have facilitated long-term trends. These include the early development of a comprehensive public childcare sector during the 1960s, continual expansion and reform to the generosity of parental leave, a combination of universal and targeted family benefits, and the growing role of active labour market policies since the 1990s. It is important to understand the path dependence of many of these factors and the interrelationship of these policies over time as key to encouraging labour market participation as the primary policy objective. As such, the important economic, political, social and cultural context is also considered.