Risk Factors for Persistent Child Poverty during the First Five Years of Life in Taiwan Birth Cohort Study

Abstract

Little is known about the child poverty dynamics in Asian countries. This study aims to learn the extent of persistent child poverty and identify its risk factors in Taiwan. Data for the analysis came from the Taiwan Birth Cohort Study, a nationally representative sample of 18,506 children who were born in 2005. The researcher defined poverty as parental income below $30,000 New Taiwan Dollars (NTD) per month. We grouped children into three types of poverty based on their family’s history: persistent poverty, occasional poverty and never poverty. This study presents a multinomial logistic regression of the relationship between risk factors and poverty types. In Taiwan, 6.0% of the sampled children experienced persistent poverty in the first five years of life. Persistent child poverty was associated with families experiencing chronic unemployment, parents with low educational attainment, mothers having children before the age of twenty-five, foreign-born mothers, single-parent families and residence in rural areas. Of these factors, parental work status and the educational level of parents are the most important determinants of child poverty.