Child poverty and child well‐being in Europe
| Pages | 18-36 |
| Date | 01 June 2007 |
| Published date | 01 June 2007 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/17466660200700003 |
| Author | Jonathan Bradshaw,Dominic Richardson,Veli‐Matti Ritakallio |
| Subject Matter | Education,Health & social care,Sociology |
18
1Professor of Social
Policy, University
of York, UK
2Research Fellow,
Social Policy
Research Unit,
University of York, UK
3Professor of Social
Policy, University of
Turku, Finland
Journal of Children’s Services
Volume 2 Issue 1 June 2007
© Pavilion Journals (Brighton) Ltd
Abstract
European Union (EU) indicators on poverty and social exclusion employ only two child breakdowns: the
proportion of children living in households with incomes below 60% of the national median using the
modified OECD equivalence scale and the proportion of children living in workless households. The UK
also uses these indicators in the Opportunities for All series. This article first develops a new indicator of
child poverty based on income, subjective and deprivation indicators which may be more reliable than
income alone. It then explores the extent to which income poverty and worklessness represent
international variation in child well-being using an index that we have developed. The conclusions are
that: (1) relative income poverty and worklessness are poor indicators of child well-being, especially for
some of the new EU countries; (2) deprivation has a stronger association with overall well-being than
relative income poverty or worklessness; (3) there are a number of other single indicators of child well-
being that could be used as proxies for overall child well-being; and (4) The EU (and the UK) could easily
develop its own index of child well-being.
Key words
child poverty; child well-being; European Union (EU)
Introduction
Policy-makers and practitioners in western developed
countries have become increasingly concerned in
recent years with tackling child poverty and enhancing
child well-being (eg. Bradshaw & Mayhew, 2005;
Jordan, 2006; Ben-Arieh & Goerge, 2006). Such efforts
require good data and analysis to better understand
how poverty and well-being are connected, how
resources might be distributed optimally to improve
children’s lives and how policy and practice should
respond to identified problems, as well as to chart
progress and so monitor the success of the strategies
implemented. These concerns extend beyond local and
national debates to the international level. Children in
poverty have been named by the European Union (EU)
as a target group in the Common Outlines and Common
Objectives of the National Action Plans for Social
Inclusion1and also in the March 2005 EU Presidency
Conclusions. However among the so-called Laeken2
primary and secondary indicators of social inclusion
only two indicators with child breakdowns have been
included (the proportion of children under 16 living in
households with equivalent income before housing
costs less than 60% of the median using the modified
OECD (Organisation for Economic Development and Co-
operation) equivalence scale, and the proportion of
children aged 0–17 living in workless households). This
is despite the fact that in the report by Professor Tony
Atkinson and colleagues prepared for the Luxembourg
Presidency (Atkinson et al, 2005) there was a proposal
that children should be ‘mainstreamed’.
The purpose of this article is not to generate a list
of policy proposals for improved child well-being
outcomes in the UK or cross-nationally, but rather to
identify the gap that exists between rhetoric and
evidence in the EU. In doing so it highlights the need
for accurate and comprehensive measures of child
poverty and child well-being, and suggests that the
EU (and the UK) could easily develop its own index of
child well-being. The first part of this article presents
the results of analysis of the European Community
Child poverty and child well-
being in Europe
Jonathan Bradshaw1, Dominic Richardson2and Veli-Matti Ritakallio3
Household Panel Survey (ECHP) designed to develop
a more reliable indicator of child poverty than the
conventional relative income measure. It relates the
findings to child benefit packages in different
countries. The second part examines levels of overall
child well-being in different countries, their
relationship with child poverty and other factors, and
how they are related to policy. We start by defining
the income poverty measure that we have used.
Child poverty
Poverty
Poverty is when an individual or family unit does not
have the resources required to maintain an acceptable
standard of living. Objective measures of an acceptable
standard can include income poverty (income below a
certain threshold), or deprivation (lack of a necessity or
object required to maintain an acceptable standard of
living). Subjective poverty is when a person believes,
regardless of actual income or other resources, or
indeed imposed perceptions of need, that they do not
have the resources required to maintain an acceptable
standard of living or to ‘make ends meet’.
Income poverty
Income poverty is measured against a threshold of
national contemporary income. The poverty rate is the
proportion of children living in households with
equivalent income below 50 or 60% of the median.
The equivalence scale used in this analysis is the
traditional OECD equivalence scale (1.0 for the first
adult, 0.7 for the second adult, 0.5 per child). An
equivalence scale is used to adjust income to the
actual needs of households of different sizes and
compositions. We have deliberately used this scale
rather than the modified OECD scale, where the first
adult to child ratio is lower (0.3 per child), on the
grounds that we believe it better represents the
equivalent needs of children.
The measure used is before housing costs.
Although we think that an after housing costs
measure would be better, there are reasons to be
anxious about the comparability of the housing costs
questions in the ECHP3. In the ECHP the income data
is for the year before the survey so the 2001 survey
collects income data for 2000.
Table 1, overleaf, shows the income poverty rates at
our two thresholds. Overall, Portugal has the highest
child poverty rates at both thresholds and Denmark the
lowest. There is some re-ranking of countries between
the thresholds. For example Austria and Finland have
relatively higher poverty rates at 60% of the median
than at 50% of the median. In all countries, except
Denmark, the risk of poverty is higher for children than
for the whole population. However there are big
differences in the relative risk of children between
countries – the relative risk for children is only a little
higher in Greece but 80% higher in Luxembourg and
70% higher in the Netherlands.
Child poverty in the UK at 60% of the median
threshold is amongst the highest in the EU 15, as is
the risk of child poverty in comparison to the whole
population. Notably only the UK, Spain and Portugal
have 10% more of their child population in poverty
compared to the population as a whole.
There are a host of problems with this income
definition of poverty. These have been reviewed in more
detail elsewhere (Bradshaw, 2007) but they include:
nit is not easy to measure income correctly in
surveys that tend to use proxy household
informants
nincome is not a good measure of command over
resources – it excludes dissavings, borrowings,
and the consumption of home production
nthe relative threshold is very different in
different countries: for example in 2003 60% of
the median was €2000 in Latvia, Estonia and
Lithuania, €14,000 in Luxembourg and over
€9000 in the UK
nthe threshold is arbitrary and it can be seen in
Table 1 that different rankings of countries are
obtained if the 50% threshold is used instead of
the 60% threshold
nthe equivalence scales which are used to adjust
income to household needs have little or no
basis in science and also the threshold chosen
makes a difference to the composition of poor
households
npoverty rates do not represent poverty gaps –
the proportion below a threshold does not
actually indicate the severity of poverty below
the threshold
npoverty rates do not tell us anything about the
persistence of poverty.
For these reasons it is advisable to complement
income measures with other indicators. We do this in
the next part of the article. This work builds on a
stream of research that perhaps began as a result of
the work of Callan, Nolan and Whelan (1993), which
resulted in Ireland adopting a combination of income
and deprivation as its official poverty measure.
Bradshaw and Finch (2003) and Adelman et al (2004)
analysed the overlaps between different measures of
poverty using data from the Poverty and Social
Exclusion Survey of Britain. Then the UK government
Child poverty and child well-being in Europe
19
Journal of Children’s Services
Volume 2 Issue 1 June 2007
© Pavilion Journals (Brighton) Ltd
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