We use cookies to provide you with the best possible website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site, as well as cookies used for anonymous statistics, comfort settings, or displaying personalized content. You can decide which categories you want to allow. Please note that depending on your settings, some features of the website may not be available.

Cookie settings

These necessary cookies are required to enable the core functionality of the website. Opting out of these cookies is not possible.

cb-enable
This cookie stores the user's cookie consent status for the current domain. Expiry: 1 year.
laravel_session
Stores the session ID to recognize the user when the page reloads and to restore their login session. Expiry: 2 hours.
XSRF-TOKEN
Provides CSRF protection for forms. Expiry: 2 hours.
IZA Discussion Paper No. 14882
November 2021
Older Immigrants' New Poverty Risk in Scandinavian Welfare States?

published in: Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2022, 48 (19), 4648 - 4669

Many European high-income countries face a rapid increase in the number of immigrants from low- and middle-income countries reaching the normal pension age. Thus, it is increasingly relevant to ask: how are older migrants from such countries faring? Here we study poverty rates and determinants of poverty among natives and persons born in Bosnia, Iran, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Turkey living in Denmark or Sweden in 2010. Income data on all such persons aged 65 to 82 living in the two destination countries are analysed. In both Denmark and Sweden, we report much higher poverty rates among the immigrants studied than among natives. Estimated probability models show that being poor is related to a person's education, family status and age, as well as year of arrival in the destination country and the labour market and his or her residential status at the age of 55. However, the labour market in the destination country at the time of arrival also matter. Persons born in Yugoslavia or Turkey who had immigrated to Denmark during the '70s and '80s were more likely to be in poverty in 2010 that their counterparts with the same characteristics who had immigrated to Sweden.

Communications
Mark Fallak
mark.fallak@liser.lu
+352 585-855-526
World of Labour
Olga Nottmeyer
olga.nottmeyer@liser.lu
+352 585-855-501
Network Coordination
Christina Gathmann
christina.gathmann@liser.lu

The IZA@LISER Network is a global community of scholars dedicated to excellence in labor economics and related fields, now coordinated at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) following its transition from Bonn.

About IZA@LISER Network
Contact
IZA Network (Current Site Operator):

Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)
11, Porte des Sciences
Maison des Sciences Humaines
L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette / Belval, Luxembourg

IZA Institute (In Liquidation):

Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH i. L.
Schaumburg-Lippe-Str. 5-9, 53113 Bonn. Germany
Phone: +49 228 3894-0 | Fax: +49 228 3894-510
E-Mail: info@iza.org | Web: www.iza.org
Represented by: Martin T. Clemens (Liquidator)