Child Deprivation, Multidimensional Poverty and Monetary Poverty in Europe

Together with the Innocenti Working paper on relative income poverty of children in rich countries (Bradshaw et al, 2012), this paper on multidimensional child poverty and child deprivation forms the background studies on which the Innocenti Report Card 10 is based (Measuring Child Poverty: New league tables of child poverty in the world‟s rich countries). The paper focuses on child deprivation in Europe and studies the degree to which it is experienced by children in 29 countries using a child specific deprivation scale. The paper discusses the construction of a child deprivation scale and estimates a European Child Deprivation Index for the 29 countries using 14 specific child related variables made available by the child module of the EU-SILC 2009 survey. The 29 countries are ranked according to the degree of child deprivation: the results show considerable differences between the countries. The (non-)overlap between child deprivation and child monetary poverty is considerable but limited. In general the results indicate where policy interventions can produce improvements.