Abstract
Empirically, official multidimensional measures of poverty often show children to be the poorest age group. Such poverty measures and their analysis can be used to directly inform policies to reduce children’s multiple deprivations. This paper introduces methods to produce official national statistics on multidimensional poverty that inform child-focused anti-poverty policies. In doing so, it recognises the importance of parsimonious, consistent measures, given practical constraints such as policy makers’ time. The paper does not recommend constructing several disjoint poverty measures which cannot be straightforwardly interpreted and used alongside one another, as these may create confusion or dilute policy attention. To create a compact and high-information measurement platform, the paper introduces four measurement strategies that have been used to directly uncover policy-relevant data on children’s experience of multidimensional poverty, and that are consistent with official population-level statistics. The four are as follows: (1) Include children’s deprivations as indicators of multidimensional poverty in national measures. (2) Disaggregate multidimensional poverty indices and their associated information platform to compare children and adults. (3) Analyse individual child deprivations and explore gendered and intra-household inequalities. (4) Construct an individual measure of child multidimensional poverty that is directly linked to the official national measure, but contains additional indicators across the life course of children. The paper illustrates these four strategies and the child-relevant statistics they yield, using examples from official poverty measures and previous research. It discusses the strengths and challenges of each method from conceptual, policy, and technical perspectives, and examines how they can be used for descriptive and prescriptive purposes in line with the Sustainable Development Goals.
Highlights
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for the global community to “By 2030, reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions.” (SDG 1.2) [1]
Integrating child indicators into national multidimensional poverty indices (MPIs) (Section 4); Age-disaggregating national MPIs to analyse levels and trends of child and adult poverty (Section 5); Analysing individual child indicators within the national MPI to illuminate gendered and age-wise intra- and across-household inequalities, and to study the crossdimensional deprivation profiles of children who experience specific deprivations (Section 6); and Constructing an individual child MPI that is directly linked to a household-level national MPI (Section 7) and that augments the age-disaggregated national MPI with individual child dimensions and age-appropriate indicators
To support efficient and clear policy responses to end poverty in all its forms and dimensions, this paper summarised, juxtaposed, and comparatively analysed four methods through which governments can—and already are—using multidimensional poverty indices (MPIs) of the Alkire–Foster class of measures to profile, analyse, and alleviate, children’s deprivations
Summary
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for the global community to “By 2030, reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions.” (SDG 1.2) [1]. Integrating child indicators into national MPIs (Section 4); Age-disaggregating national MPIs to analyse levels and trends of child and adult poverty (Section 5); Analysing individual child indicators within the national MPI to illuminate gendered and age-wise intra- and across-household inequalities, and to study the crossdimensional deprivation profiles of children who experience specific deprivations (Section 6); and Constructing an individual child MPI that is directly linked to a household-level national MPI (Section 7) and that augments the age-disaggregated national MPI with individual child dimensions and age-appropriate indicators These four approaches will be described in turn, after a concise introduction to the Alkire–Foster Method that is used to construct MPIs (Section 2), and a brief section that discusses in more detail the literature on concepts and measures of child poverty as well as the motivation of synergetic measurement approaches (Section 3). The penultimate section compares the four approaches vis-à-vis one another (Section 8), whilst the final section concludes (Section 9)
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