Multidimensional Child Poverty in Korea: Developing Child-Specific Indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

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.