The Breadth of Child Poverty in Europe: An Investigation into Overlap of Deprivations

Abstract

Moral, efficiency, and rights-based arguments have sparked widespread acknowledgement in both academic and policy circles that children deserve a special focus in poverty measurement. Children can be considered to have a "differential experience" of poverty in childhood, setting their situation apart from adults as well as from other children depending on their life-stage. The European Union (EU) is among those bodies that have recognized the need for child-focused indicators in monitoring poverty and social exclusion and is currently in the process of developing, testing, and comparing single indicators of child well-being across member states. In this article, we seek to add to this debate by providing a micro-analysis of the breadth of child poverty in the EU by analyzing the overlap of deprivations across monetary and multidimensional indicators of poverty. Thereby, we aim to gain insight into the breadth of child poverty and degree of overlap between measures of monetary and multidimensional poverty in the EU. Particular attention will be paid to the investigation of cross-country and cross-domain differences. Using the 2007 wave of the EU-SILC data, we compare the EU monetary "at-risk-ofpoverty" indicator to a range of child deprivation indicators at domain level in four EU Member States (Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom). Overall, the article's findings provide a strong call for the need to take a multidimensional approach toward the measurement of child poverty in the EU context. Size and group differences between children faced with income poverty and/or deprivation in other domains are considerable and underline the need to take a broader perspective to identify those that are vulnerable. Overlap analysis of income and domain poverty suggests considerable mismatch across the board, regardless of the particular country under consideration. This suggests a considerable breadth of child poverty in the EU, meaning that deprivation in monetary and non-monetary terms does not seem to be concentrated on a few particular groups but rather spread out across the population with large numbers of children likely to face deprivation in a few domains. Although dependent on the domain and country under consideration, single parenthood, living in a rented dwelling, low work intensity, and income poverty are found significantly and considerably the risk to poverty.

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).…”

“…Evidence with respect to child poverty is less extensive but points towards similar mismatch patterns (Notten, 2012;Roelen et al, 2012;Roelen and Notten 2013) and indicates that monetary and multidimensional child poverty are different phenomena (Roelen, 2017).…”

Beyond averages: Child well-being in Kazakhstan

“…This observation holds true in developing as well as developed countries. Roelen and Notten (2013) find that income poverty and multi dimensional poverty indicators cannot stand in for each other, as they lead to different conclusions about the magnitude of poverty and the groups of children it affects. In addition, the degree of mismatch found across indicators of poverty suggests that instead of a small number of children experiencing deprivation in large numbers of domains, large numbers of children are likely to face deprivation in a few domains.…”

Lost (in) Dimensions

“…Many researchers, including Roelen and Notten (2011), Perry (2002, de Neubourg, Roelen, Gassmann (2010), Bradshaw et al (2008), Whelan (2011), andMansour (2012) have concentrated on analysing the degree of overlap and non-overlap between different concepts of poverty. Their studies show that monetary indicators do not identify the same groups of people as deprivation indicators.…”