Child poverty in the EU: The breadth of poverty and cumulative deprivation

The Child Poverty Insights - Social and Economic Policy UNICEF Policy and Practice

by Keetie Roelen and Geranda Notten
Posted on 10-02-2011	Translate this page

Published by The Child Poverty Insights - Social and Economic Policy UNICEF Policy and Practice, this report on multidimensional child poverty in the European Union was written by Keetie Roelen at the Institute of Development Studies, UK and Geranda Notten at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

The report is an attempt to add to the academic and policy debate around child poverty in the region, its measurement and the use of indicators to inform policy. Information about child poverty from a macro-perspective, including the well-known UNICEF IRC Report Card 7,sparked intense policy debate in the United Kingdom after it ranked bottom (UNICEF IRC, 2007). Recent studies have also considered child poverty from a micro-perspective, performing analysis at the level of the individual child (TARKI, 2011). However, no studies have considered the multiple deprivations which children can experience at the same time and the extent to which they can be considered ‘cumulatively deprived.’

In this work, the authors sought to address questions around the patterns of overlap in different dimensions of poverty, the ‘breadth’ of poverty, as well as the combination of information in measures of cumulative deprivation. Among other things, three facts become clear from this work:  

* Indicators of monetary poverty and multidimensional poverty cannot serve as a proxy for one another;

* There are risk factors that increase a child’s likelihood of being poor or deprived;

* Multidimensional poverty measures enables policy makers to identify the most vulnerable children and design holistic anti-poverty policies.

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