Perspektiv på välfärden 2004 (pdf) - Statistiska centralbyrån

Youth
Introduction
Young people have always been subject to concern
related to their youth, both with respect to
‘disturbing’ youth culture and behaviour
(Lindgren 2002) as well as to how social changes
affect the transition into adulthood (Bynner, Chisholm
and Furlong 1997; Jones and Wallace 1992).
These concerns seem justified, as youth is a formative
transition phase, signified by a successive
move through the educational system, labour
market establishment and family formation, that
hopefully, considering the alternative, everybody
will go through. It is furthermore a period that for
many is signified by unemployment, economic
hardship, uncertainty about the future and insecurity
about one's own ability to handle the situation.
Young people are also, increasingly it seems,
being pinpointed as losers who lag behind older
generations, i.e., the middle aged, with regard to
economic prosperity and career opportunities (cf.
Häll and Vogel 1997; Vogel 1994). The problem
with this reasoning, when repeated over time, is
that those who were young losers twenty years
ago are middle-aged winners today, or to be more
correct, some of them are winners and some are
still losers. It is consequently clear that we should
focus, not only on the conditions among the
young at one point in time, but first and foremost
on the long-term impact of conditions prevailing
during adolescence. However, although the problems
young people face have been thoroughly
discussed in the literature, we know relatively
little about the long-term impact of these problems.
As a result, we lack the knowledge necessary
to determine whether our worries about
young people and their future are justified, and
perhaps even more important, to determine
whether we are worried about the right things.
The aim of this study is therefore to analyse the
degree to which circumstances during adolescence
affect future income development and the
incidence of economic difficulties in adult life. To
do so, we use a panel sample that was first interviewed
in the beginning in the 1980s when the
panel members were between 19 and 25 years old.
A second panel wave was completed eight years
later, and the final wave after sixteen years.
Hence, the panel covers 16 years and at the third
wave, the respondents were between 35 and 41
years old.
Young and poor
It is more or less a given fact that a substantial
portion of young people have low incomes
(Salonen 1993; Salonen 2000). The temporality of
this situation is in most cases also more or less
given; income mobility and changes in economic
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standard are, for example, immense among those
below the age of thirty, compared to the middle
aged (Björklund 1993). However, there is more
than just a gap between the young and the rest of
the population. Since the 1970´s, the development
of young people's incomes has been lower than
for the rest of the population (Torége 1997). The
main explanation for this development is a general
social change resulting in prolonged education,
in combination with increasing youth unemployment,
leading to a general postponement of
labour market establishment (Banks et al. 1992;
Bynner, Chisholm and Furlong 1997; Jones and
Wallace 1992).
Knowing that many young people have low incomes
does not mean that we know they actually
also suffer from economic hardship and a low
economic standard, i.e., that they have to forgo
vital consumption, have problems making ends
meet and live in economic insecurity. First, the
economic standard is not primarily determined by
the individual’s income, but by the household’s
disposable income and the number of people assumed
to share that income. Thus, as long a
young person stays in the nest, he/she can be assumed
to share at least the common consumption
within the household (housing, food, equipment,
such as TV etc.) 1 . For example, comparison of the
situation in different European countries shows
that young people in Sweden and other Scandinavian
countries are, in relation to the middle aged,
relatively worse off compared to the young in
central Europe and, even more so, in comparison
to those in Mediterranean countries (Vogel 2002).
The main reason for this is that young people in
the northern part of Europe leave the nest earlier
than do those in southern Europe. Second, even
though a young person has left the nest, it is possible
that there is a substantial flow of economic
resources from the parents to the child, again obscuring
the relationship between income and economic
standard. It is possible to make a long list
of circumstances that blur the relationship between
income and standard of living (cf. Halleröd
2000), making it clear that it is important that we
1 Swedish income data have long been hampered by an
incomplete household definition. As soon as a person
turns eighteen, she or he has been treated as a specific
household unit, regardless of whether any real change
has occurred. Hence, a significant number of young
people, still living in their parental home, are registered
as having an extremely low disposable household income.
The incidence of poverty among the young
therefore becomes overestimated – and underestimated
among older populations (Halleröd 2000). In more
recent publications on income distribution, Statistics
Sweden has corrected this error.