Housing deprivation is a key determinant of the capacity to prevent infection and to recover from a disease because poor housing prevents adequate sheltering during a quarantine. We analyze the degree of housing deprivation faced by households in European countries when COVID-19 lockdown measures were enacted. To do so, we propose a synthetic measure that includes more dimensions than the official Eurostat indicator of severe housing deprivation. We use a fuzzy set approach to measure housing deprivation so that, unlike traditional deprivation approaches, based on a dichotomous variable, we can identify different degrees of housing deprivation for each household in the population. We find similar orderings of housing deprivation dimensions by country with the highest degree of deprivation in the living space dimension and the lowest one in the standard housing or technology deprivation dimension. Nonetheless, housing deprivation levels differ across countries, with Eastern European households being significantly more housing deprived than the rest when the lockdown began. This result shows that the effects of the lockdown on social well-being have not affected all Europeans equally and emphasizes the need for government measures that promote decent housing.

Children are generally at a higher risk of poverty than the population as a whole, although the mechanisms that lead to their socio-economic vulnerability vary widely across European countries. This paper aims to further our understanding of to what extent cross-country variations in child poverty risk are associated with different ways of social transfer targeting: pro-poor versus pro-child targeting. In particular, we address the potential impact on child poverty of countries’ intent to target transfers at lower incomes and children across 30 European countries. Using a multilevel framework, we find that not only the size of the transfer system, but also the form of targeting matters in reducing child poverty. Specifically, the countries’ intent to target children matters even more than their intent to target lower incomes, in terms of reducing child poverty. Moreover, the prevalence of multi-generational households in a country seems to be associated with an attempt to protect against child poverty in countries with lower levels of pro-child targeting.