A huge percentage of residents in Norway, students inclusive could be classified as low-income earners as indicated by statistics. It shows that households in Norway are quite poor and hardly own their own homes. There are also some of these own assets and shares in companies, a total of about 14.2% households.
An estimated 14.2% of Norwegian people are poor compared to the 10.8% report in 2014. A majority of the people with low incomes in the country are not in the labor market as the reports from Statistics Norway numbers. Most of them are people who receive social welfare.
This was also the case with the statistics from situations where the income-earner of a household is not employed long-term or if their capacity for working is low and also with households that the main income earner has a refugee background. Also, there are a pretty large number of these homes that consist of young people that live alone and single providers with children.
A large percentage of low income earners fall under the class of pensioners, although the number is gradually dropping. Within the people receiving benefits for disability, about 12% of them are in the low-income group. This was compared to 58% of people receiving social welfare, all of whom were low-income earners.
Housing challenge
Most of the immigrants from Asia and Africa that moved to Norway had low income as well, according to the EU. About 47% of refugees in the country fall within this group with low income and also unemployed long-term.
According to Statistics Norway, people within these groups had several financial issues that were related to housing. And many of them were in housing debt and the proportion of their low income was high. Although the incomes of Norwegians are reducing because of the fall in oil prices, reports from OECD indicated that Norwegians still spend a lot of money because of the benefits they receive from the state.
However, some of that spending has been discovered to not benefit the local economy at all. You see, the local population is quite dedicated to things like gambling, which we can all agree is not the best habit. However, it’s even worse in Norway. You see, the government has issued a law which makes any private casino illegal on its borders. Only the government-owned casinos are allowed. This doesn’t prevent more cases, but in fact encourages people to seek opportunities abroad, thus denying the local economy some kind of income. If you follow this link, you’ll easily see just how many brands cater to Norwegian citizens, which begs the question whether or not it’s worth denying the local economy the income that this industry can generate in the future.
Low income for many years
Statistics Norway also made their reports having in mind that people have money-related issues for short periods of time and because of this, it calculated the number of people who’ve had income for long periods of over three years. The population in Norway has been the same for several years and around 8%. Although it reached 9.6% between 2015 to 2017.
Poor families with children in Norway
In other Nordic countries, the number of children living in low-income homes is lower than the figures in Norway. The percentage of people living in low-income homes in Sweden is higher than those in Norway.
However, in Finland and Denmark, the percentage of children living in low-income homes was lower than that of Norway and Sweden. Maybe an explanation for this could be that these two countries have more immigrants than the previous two.
EU method of measurement
Statistics Norway used a common EU method that is called “poverty” to calculate this. If a person has less than 60% of the median income, they are considered as having a low income. This type of measurement is done comparing the income of people to others. In a rich country such as Norway, when compared to people in poor countries, it would mean that individuals considered as poor have a pretty decent life, although they are still in the low-income bracket.
Some other figures show a yearly income. Which is another measurement used to compare the financial situations is capital. It was reported that low-income households can have high capital while those with reasonable income could have little or none. But Statistics Norway wasn’t surprised to find out that this was not the case, as low-income earners had low capital and those with a pretty decent income had high capital.
