According to data from 2021, over one-quarter (26%) of the EU’s youth population (aged 15-29 years) were residing in overcrowded households. This rate exceeded the overcrowding rate for the EU’s overall population by nine percentage points, which stood at 17%.
However, this issue was not uniformly distributed across the EU, with considerable disparities found among its member states.
Notably, the five countries experiencing the highest rates of youth overcrowding were Romania (60%), Bulgaria (57%), Latvia (54%), Greece (48%), and Poland (47%).
Conversely, the lowest rates were reported in Cyprus and Malta (roughly 4% each), Ireland (5%), and the Netherlands and Belgium (around 8% each).
Despite the overall high rate, a few EU countries were successful in mitigating the discrepancy between the overcrowding rates among the youth and the general populace. Remarkably, Luxembourg, along with Ireland, Cyprus, Malta, and Belgium recorded the smallest differences. In Luxembourg, the disparity was only 2.6 percentage points.
The case was dramatically different in countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, and Finland, where the youth overcrowding rate was more than double the overall population’s rate. Specifically, the rates stood at 21.6% for Danish youth vs 9.2% for the total Danish population, 7.5% vs 3.4% in the Netherlands, and 15.6% vs 7.4% in Finland.
Luxembourg’s lower discrepancy in the overcrowding rates bode well amid the pressing issue across the EU.
