Child income poverty and child deprivation: an essay on measurement

Abstract

This paper is a study on child poverty from two perspectives: child income poverty (derived from family income) and child deprivation (evaluated by non-monetary indicators). On the one hand, empirical evidence supports the thesis that income-based poverty measures and deprivation measures do not overlap. On the other hand, the relationship between poverty and the child's living conditions is not linear. Uses micro-econometric techniques to analyse child income poverty and present deprivation indicators, and thereby an index of child deprivation, to study child poverty. The measurements used are centred on the child. The results obtained support the thesis that the study of child poverty differs whether the focus is on the child or on the family.

Poor Children in Rich Households and Vice Versa: A Blurred Picture or Hidden Realities?

“…A cross-country study in four countries in the European Union (EU) finds that children living in monetary poor households are not necessarily those suffering from deprivation in non-monetary dimensions, and vice versa (Roelen and Notten, 2013). Analogous observations were made for children in Portugal (Bastos et al, 2004). With respect to child poverty in the UK, Brewer et al (2009) find that as household income rises, children's levels of deprivation first rise and then fall.…”

A Weighted Multidimensional Index of Child Well-Being Which Incorporates Children’s Individual Perceptions

“…Health is obviously of the utmost importance as a dimension of child well-being and its inclusion in a child well-being index is unquestionably found in a vast majority of studies on the matter (e.g., Land et al 2001Land et al , 2007Bastos et al 2004Bastos et al , 2008Bradshaw et al 2007;4 Questionnaires are available upon request to the corresponding author. 5 Income categories in the questionnaire were defined according to the Portuguese National Statistics Institute's (INE 2008) categorization of the annual total net income of households, divided by the twelve months of the year in order to obtain monthly income.…”

“…Research has shown that housing conditions affect children's well-being (see e.g., Aber et al 2002;Hoelscher 2004;Bradshaw et al 2007), so indicators related to physical housing problems, such as rotten windows, having a flushing toilet and a shower/bathtub (Bradshaw et al 2007;Bradshaw and Richardson 2009), as well as indicators related to overcrowding and specifically to the child having or not his/her own private space in the house (Hoelscher 2004;Bastos et al 2004Bastos et al , 2008Bradshaw et al 2007;Bastos and Machado 2009;Bradshaw and Richardson 2009), emerge as relevant.…”

“…The indicators were chosen taking into account existing literature on child well-being indicators (e.g., Land et al 2001Land et al , 2007Aber et al 2002;Hoelscher 2004;Bradshaw et al 2006Bradshaw et al , 2007Moore et al , 2008UNICEF 2007;Bastos et al 2004Bastos et al , 2008Bastos and Machado 2009;Bradshaw and Richardson 2009), and following also Bronfenbrenner and Morris' (1998) model of human development. Table 3 presents the complete list of indicators, sorted by dimensions, but before proceeding, some considerations on the choice of the indicators are in order.…”

“…Several research studies both in the U.S. and Europe followed on from this work, namely those of Land et al (2007), Bradshaw et al (2007Bradshaw et al ( , 2009, Moore et al ( , 2008 and Bastos et al (2004Bastos et al ( , 2008Bastos et al ( , 2009. 1 However, improvements to the methodologies used in these studies are still required, be it because of the use of aggregated data, as is the case of Land et al (2001Land et al ( , 2007 and Bradshaw et al (2007Bradshaw et al ( , 2009, or because children's perspectives are generally overlooked, which is, for example, the case of Moore et al ( , 2008, who use microdata, but collected from parents and not from children.…”