Blog
Child Well-Being in an Expanding EU

by John Micklewright and Kitty Stewart

The accession of up to 13 new members in the next decade is the most important development now facing the European Union (EU). Naturally, the credentials of the applicants are under careful scrutiny. But the expansion of any club provides an opportunity to look in a mirror and consider the state of the existing membership as well.

The best-known criteria for EU membership, and those which form the corner-stone of negotiations over accession, are the economic ones. Applicants must have a functioning market economy and the capacity to cope with competitive pressures. However, the 'Copenhagen Criteria' governing EU entry are much wider than this, with a strong emphasis on stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy - and on human rights.

In our research we have argued that the European Commission’s reports on progress towards accession of the 10 applicant countries from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) pay insufficient attention to economic, social and cultural rights within the overall heading of ‘human rights’. Mention of particular problems is made in certain countries, e.g. the state of orphanages in Romania. But there is no comprehensive effort to measure outcomes that reflect whether these sorts of human rights are being fulfilled.

Similarly, we argue that the Commission’s analysis of living standards among the existing EU members has taken too narrow a view of ‘economic and social cohesion’, the strengthening of which is one of the EU’s principal goals. The Commission’s first (and only) cohesion report to date, published in 1996, defined cohesion to imply ‘greater equality in economic and social opportunities’ but stuck to disappointingly traditional measures of opportunity, largely employment and average income. We urge for a broader vision of cohesion, one that takes a wider view of development and of individual well-being, similar, for example, to that of the UNDP'’s Human Development Reports and the associated ‘capability’ approach of Amartya Sen.

Both of these subjects - the inspection of EU applicants and the analysis of cohesion among existing members - leads naturally to attention to the position of children. Convergence in well-being across the Union, whether defined as 15 or 25 (or 28) members, means moving towards similar opportunities for European children wherever they are born.​

The importance of children’s well-being to Europe’s future is underlined by considering the socialist inheritance of the CEE countries in terms of state socialism’s impact on human development. The comparative advantage of socialism over capitalism in the field of family policy is often exaggerated, as is the extent of ‘cradle to grave’ support that was provided. Nethertheless, it is broadly the case that policy in socialist countries attached much greater emphasis to some aspects of children’s development than was the case in other countries at similar levels of national income. The results in terms of health care and educational outcomes can still be seen today, despite the upheavals of the past decade. It is partly because of the past investments in children in the CEE region that the EU is now able to contemplate applications from countries that in some cases are hugely adrift in terms of national income.

Current investments in children in the CEE countries are of vital importance if transition is to result in greater cohesion in the long-term in an expanded Union. Development missed out on during childhood is not easy to recoup in later life. Greater inequalities in health and educational opportunity may affect particular groups of children. And all children may suffer if public expenditure on education, for example, falls sharply. None of this will aid cohesion in the future EU.

Implementing human rights or strengthening cohesion involves change to policies. However, policies as represented by legislation and administrative frameworks provide an insufficient guide to what actually happens in practice. We therefore focus in our research on outcomes across a range of dimensions of well-being - the material welfare of children (child poverty), their health, and their educational attainment.​

​The graph provides one example. The poorer CEE countries of Bulgaria, Latvia and Romania stand out as having under-5 mortality rates (U5MR) substantially above those of EU members. But several applicants are not too far out of line. The Czech Republic is within the EU range while Slovenia has a rate below the EU-15 average. If member states with a higher rate were to have had the Slovenian U5MR, there would have been 4,000 fewer deaths among children of this age in the EU-15 in 1996. The possibility that any applicant actually has an absolute advantage over current EU members in any dimension of living standards is something that is completely overlooked in both media and academic focus on the relative economic strengths of the two groups of countries.

Not surprisingly the situation varies across the different areas of child well-being that we consider. But the general pattern is reasonably clear: there are often wide disparities in performance among both CEE applicants and EU members and, while applicants often lag behind on average, a simple story of all the members performing better than all the applicants (as is the case with GDP per capita) is frequently far from the truth.

It is not our purpose to argue that applicants to the EU should only be admitted if they have an U5MR below a given level, or that the benefits of existing members be suspended if they exceed it (on the grounds that this constitutes a ‘serious and persistent breach’ of human rights under the Treaty on Union). But we do see attention to such indicators of economic, social and cultural rights as a vital part of the process of judging living standards and policies in the EU club - both applicants and current member states. 
 

Dr John Micklewright is Head of Research at UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence. Dr Kitty Stewart is Research Fellow in STICERD at the London School of Economics.

This article draws on the authors'’ UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre Working Paper 75, ‘'Child Well-Being in the EU - and Enlargement to the East', which may be downloaded from: www.unicef-icdc.org/pdf/iwp75.pdf