Most Europeans believe that six out of ten children from poor families will remain poor in their adulthood, the Vecernji List daily wrote on Thursday.

A survey carried out by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group that brings together the world’s 38 richest countries, shows that in OECD countries it takes nearly five generations for children from low-income families to get closer to the average income in their country.

As many as 63 out of 100 children in Croatia think that their family is poor and their parents cannot ensure an appropriate social status for them, Vecernji List says.

In 2018, the European Commission launched a pilot project to develop new criteria for measuring poverty. Zagreb Law School Professor Zoran Sucur, a leading Croatian authority on social inequalities, is involved in the project.

For decades, a country’s degree of poverty has been determined by medial income, and families and individuals with less than 60 per cent of the medial income are believed to be at the greatest risk of poverty.

In 2022, the poverty threshold for Croatia was an annual income of €5,260 for single persons. Anyone with a monthly income of less than €438 net was considered poor. The threshold for a family with two children aged under 14 years was €11,000 annually, or €920 monthly.

It turned out that 18 per cent of Croatian citizens, or 694,000 individuals, lived with less than these amounts and were considered at risk of poverty, Vecernji List said.