Mothers’ non-farm work, women’s empowerment and multidimensional child poverty: evidence from rural China

Caste-based analysis of multidimensional early childhood poverty in India: Patterns and determinants

BackgroundThe global poverty profile shows that Africa and Asia bear the highest burden of multidimensional child poverty. Child survival and development therefore depend on socioeconomic and environmental factors that surround a child.The aim of this paper is to measure multidimensional child poverty and underpin what drives it among children aged 5 to 18 years in a resource poor region of Burkina Faso.MethodsUsing primary data collected from a cross sectional study of 722 households in the Mouhoun region of Burkina Faso, the Alkire–Foster methodology was applied to estimate and decompose child poverty among children aged 5–18 years. Seven broad dimensions guided by the child poverty literature, data availability and the country’s SDGs were used. A binary logistic regression model was applied to identify drivers of multidimensional child poverty in the region.ResultsThe highest prevalence of deprivations were recorded in water and sanitation (91%), information and leisure (89%) followed by education (83%). Interestingly, at k = 3 (the sum of weighted indicators that a child must be deprived to be considered multidimensionally poor), about 97% of children are deprived in at least three of the seven dimensions. At k = 4 to k = 6, between 88.7 and 30.9% of children were equally classified as suffering from multidimensional poverty. The odds of multidimensional poverty were reduced in children who belonged to households with a formally educated mother (OR = 0.49) or stable sources of income (OR = 0.31, OR = 0.33). The results equally revealed that being an adolescent (OR = 0.67), residing in the urban area of Boromo (OR = 0.13) and rural area of Safané (OR = 0.61) reduced the odds of child poverty. On the other hand, child poverty was highest among children from the rural area of Yé (OR = 2.74), polygamous households (OR = 1.47, OR = 5.57 and OR = 1.96), households with an adult head suffering from a longstanding illness (OR = 1.61), households with debts (OR = 1.01) and households with above five number of children/woman (OR = 1.49).ConclusionChild poverty is best determined by using a multidimensional approach that involves an interplay of indicators and dimensions, bearing in mind its causation.

This study examines the trends in multidimensional child poverty in China from 2012 to 2018 using data from the China Family Panel Studies(CFPS). To determine multidimensional poverty, five dimensions and ten indicators were established and the Alkire-Foster (AF) method was used in analyzing. The study categorizes Chinese children into urban children, rural children, and left-behind children. The results indicate that multidimensional poverty has improved across all child groups, with left-behind children being the most exposed to multidimensional poverty, followed by rural children and urban children. Among the indicators, the greatest reductions in deprivation were observed in “health insurance” and “internet access.” Logistic regression analysis identified “left-behind child status” and “non-apartment housing conditions” as the most significant factors influencing multidimensional child poverty.

This article presents the development of a measure to assess the prevalence and patterning of multidimensional child poverty in South Korea. The first goal of UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to reduce poverty in all its dimensions, and countries are increasingly developing their own measures of multidimensional poverty. This flourishing of different measures presents challenges for international comparisons. The article applies an internationally-validated method of assessing multidimensional poverty to demonstrate its suitability for use in a high-income Asian economy. Multidimensional child poverty is assessed by combining data on child material deprivation with their household income. Using data from the 2018 Korean National Children Survey, we show that child material deprivation is higher (15%) than income poverty (12%). When measured using a combined measure of material deprivation and income, around one in every three children in Korea were found to be either poor or vulnerable to poverty. These findings show that the official monetary poverty measure on its own may understate the percentage of children unable to afford necessities in Korea, as envisioned by international targets like the SDGs. In terms of policy, analysis of individual deprivations suggests that a combination of in-kind benefits such as vouchers for leisure activities or education and asset-building programmes as well as cash transfers are needed for tackling child poverty.

This paper aims to examine child poverty in Korea by constructing a multidimensional child poverty index. The Sustainable Development Goals (hereafter SDGs) recommends producing children-specific poverty statistics based on the concept of multidimensional poverty. Responding to such global norms and trends, in Korea, there is an increasing need to define and measure multidimensional poverty among children, focusing on the individual rather than the household as a whole. Drawing on the Poverty and Social Exclusion methodology, we established a Child Deprivation Index and combined it with household income to estimate multidimensional child poverty, using data from the 2013 Korean National Child Survey. The findings show that the number of children in poverty are in fact around 10% of the child population, as measured by material deprivation and income combined, which is two times higher than the official Korean child poverty rate. This indicates that conventional measurements, based only on household income, not only insufficiently identifies poor children, but also excludes more than half of the potential recipients from the social assistance system. In addition, our logit analysis offers strong evidence that deprived children are mostly living in working-poor and single-parent households. These findings lead to the conclusion that various support for the working poor should be considered as important child policy agenda. In this respect, the child-focused poverty measurement produced in this study has more significant implications for practical policy objectives than the income-based approach, as well as a higher theoretical and methodological accuracy.

BackgroundEmpirically, the official measurement of multidimensional poverty often shows children as the poorest age group. According to Global Multidimensional Poverty Index report, Africa and South Asia bear the highest burden multidimensional child poverty (MCP). Around one-third of children aged 0–4 are multidimensionally poor in India. Policymakers in India must have appropriate information on child poverty to alleviate poverty. The purpose of this paper is to examine MCP trends and track efforts to reduce child poverty at the national level across geographic regions, castes, and religious groups.MethodsWe used the Alkire-Foster method to calculate the MCP index (MCPI) among children aged 0–4 using the latest two rounds of National Family Health Survey data (2015–16 and 2019–21). We applied the Shapley decomposition method to analyse the marginal contribution of incidence and intensity that lead to changes in MCPI.ResultsIn India, the incidence of child poverty reduced by more than 40% between 2015–16 and 2019–21 (46.6–27.4%) and the MCPI reduced by half (24.2–12.6%). The relative decline in MCPI has been largest for urban areas, northern regions, Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Hindus. Children from rural areas, Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and Muslim households are the poor performers. When focusing exclusively on the poor child, we found all the population subgroups and geographic locations reduced the censored headcount ratios in all 14 indicators. Across places of residence, castes, religions, and regions the, indicators like electricity, birth registration, drinking water, assisted delivery, sanitation and cooking fuel made significant improvements between 2015–16 to 2019–21.ConclusionThe study indicates that by studying the MCPI over time, one can identify the priorities in policy development to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

Poverty is complex and multidimensional and particularly pronounced in children living in semi-arid West Africa. Unfortunately, few studies have addressed multidimensional child poverty in this region. Using novel data generated from 431 randomly selected households in the Boucle du Mouhoun region in Burkina Faso, the Alkire–Foster methodology was applied to estimate and decompose multidimensional poverty among adolescent children. Ten dimensions guided by the child poverty literature, data availability and the country’s SDGs were used. While deprivations in water and sanitation (89%), health (75%), nutrition (82%), and child labour (48.7%) were found to be more prevalent in the rural areas, child subjective well-being (73%) and child protection (61%) were more pronounced in the urban areas. Analysis of multiple overlaps in dimensions shows that all of the children suffer from deprivations in three or more dimensions simultaneously. Furthermore, when the poverty cut-off values were set at k = 20% (“Vulnerable to Poverty”), k = 30% (“Multidimensionally Poor”) and k = 50% (“Poverty Severity”), close to 95% of children are categorized as being in “Severe Poverty”, 68% as “Multidimensionally Poor”, and 38% as being “Vulnerable to Poverty”. Using binary logistic regressions, household size, age and marital status of household head, locality of child, income source, debt status, education, number of siblings, gender of child, adults and maternal health condition were found to be significantly correlated to poverty vulnerability, multidimensionally poor and poverty severity in the region. The implications of these findings for multidimensional child poverty targeted policies and interventions are discussed.

The influence of contextual and household factors on multidimensional poverty in rural Vietnam: A multilevel regression analysis

Children with disabilities: Left behind or forgotten? Empirical evidence from Botswana using multidimensional poverty measures

The Social Construction of Commitment and Satisfaction with Farm and Nonfarm Work

This paper systematically reviews the literature on multidimensional child poverty to provide insight into the socio-economic and cultural factors behind it in Tanzania. Recognising the pressing need to understand child-specific deprivations, the study has employed a structured methodology based on the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method. The review process aimed to search for terms using the Population, Interventions, Comparison and Outcome (PICO) framework, which included keywords such as “child poverty”, “multidimensional child poverty”, “child deprivation”, and “multidimensional child deprivation”. The paper sourced data from two high-impact databases, Web of Science and Scopus. To ensure rigour in the selection, we followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework, narrowing down an initial set of 427 publications to 238 by applying filters on duplicates, relevance, and publication date to reduce this number to only 238. These were supplemented with 16 reports from the United Republic of Tanzania, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank to ensure a comprehensive view of the subject. Using thematic analysis, this review summarised household composition, traditional gender roles, parental education, household income inequalities, and rural-urban differences as the main factors affecting multidimensional child poverty from the selected studies. These findings highlight the diverse determinants of multidimensional child poverty in Tanzania, identifying a necessity for tailored intervention integrating socio-economic and cultural factors to address this persistent issue.

Early childhood deprivations and inequalities have social and economic implications in adulthood and thus, their elimination is essential for child development. However, child-level estimates of poverty are rare in low income countries. Using data from two recent rounds of the Ghana Demographic and Health Survey, we measure the extent and sources of childhood deprivations in Ghana and examine subgroup differentials in child poverty. In addition, we examine the child quality-quantity by estimating the causal relationship between number of children and child poverty. Finally, we assess the sources of rural-urban inequalities in child poverty. We find that despite declining incidence and intensity of multidimensional child poverty, significant subgroup differentials persist in Ghana. The findings of the paper reveal that living standards is the main contributor to multidimensional poverty in early childhood in Ghana. Our findings also confirm a significant causal relationship between child quality and quantity in Ghana, there exist a positive relationship between the number of children and the intensity of child poverty in Ghana. Finally, we find that rural-urban inequalities in child multidimensional poverty in Ghana are attributable to differences in observed maternal and household characteristics between rural and urban areas. The persistence of subgroup disparities in child poverty may be detrimental to achieving equitable and inclusive growth in the country. There is the need for considerations of equity, fairness and social justice in the distribution and development of social services and economic infrastructure to ensure even distribution of social and economic opportunities and promote social mobility across groups.

In this paper, we use a multidimensional framework to characterise child poverty in the UK. We examine the interdependencies amongst the different dimensions of multidimensional poverty and the relationship between multidimensional poverty and income poverty. We also explore the links between multidimensional poverty, income poverty and children's cognitive and non‐cognitive development. Our findings suggest that multidimensional poverty identifies many but not all of the same children classified using standard income poverty measures. Approximately 20 per cent of children are classified as poor on one measure but not the other. Children in workless households and ethnic minority children face the highest odds of growing up in both multidimensional poverty and income poverty. We find similar levels of persistence in multidimensional poverty and income poverty, with 17 per cent (18 per cent) of children experiencing persistent multidimensional (income) poverty and 10 per cent of children experiencing both persistent multidimensional poverty and persistent income poverty. Multidimensional poverty (both episodic and persistent) also has a detrimental impact on children's development over and above the negative impact of income poverty.

China eliminated rural poverty under current poverty standards in 2020. However, compared with rural poverty, urban poverty in China has been somewhat neglected. This paper aims to discover the changes and determinants of multidimensional urban poverty in Shandong Province, a representative province in Eastern China. Using a nationally representative panel dataset, the China Family Panel Studies, and the Dual Cutoff method, this study creates a multidimensional poverty index with four dimensions and 11 indicators to measure urban poverty in Shandong Province. This paper discovers that while the incidence of multidimensional urban poverty in Shandong Province decreased from 47.62% in 2010 to 36.45% in 2018, the intensity of multidimensional poverty only decreased from 41.27% to 37.25%, which indicates the inadequacy of urban anti-poverty efforts in Shandong Province. This paper also uses logistic regression to identify the determinants of multidimensional urban poverty. The findings suggest that income, health, drinking water, and durable goods are the main determinants of multidimensional urban poverty in Shandong Province. Based on these findings, this study provides targeted recommendations for future urban anti-poverty policies in Shandong Province.

Despite a rapid expansion of the bodies of research on the measurement of multidimensional poverty, chronic poverty and child poverty, little attention has been paid to the longitudinal aspects of multidimensional poverty. Even less evidence is available about longitudinal multidimensional child poverty. This paper combines these strands of research, using household survey data from 2004, 2006 and 2008 from Vietnam to analyze cross-sectional poverty trends and longitudinal poverty dynamics. The purpose of this study is three-fold as it (i) examines the lives of children in Vietnam and considers changes in their living conditions in the first decade of the 21st century; (ii) assesses various hypotheses drawn from the chronic multidimensional poverty literature; and (iii) presents an explorative study of the investigation of child poverty from a longitudinal perspective using a multidimensional approach. Main conclusions suggest that the large reduction of child poverty in Vietnam has been unequal and that a sizeable proportion of children remain locked into poverty. Theoretically, this paper finds that characteristics of chronic versus transient poor children are similar and that the association between poverty depth and duration is not strong enough to consider one measure a proxy for the other.