Innocenti Working Papers

The paper reflects on the potential of the OECD DAC creditor reporting system to systematically capture flows of official development assistance (ODA) in support of realising children’s rights. The growth in modalities for delivering aid, including sector programmes, SWAP’s, dedicated funds which encompass public-private partnerships such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, as well as the OECD-DAC commitment to promote harmonization and simplification in provision of ODA and promote government ownership through general budget support raises challenges to assessing ODA for children. The question also needs asking whether singling out and measuring direct assistance to children is meaningful. The paper goes on to analyse ODA trends for basic social services. It shows that ODA to basic social services as a proportion of total ODA has been on an upward trend during the 1995-2004 period, particularly since 2000, the year in which the Millennium Summit set out the Millennium Agenda including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and further boosted by the Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development. It shows that ODA to combat HIV and address AIDS infections has increased rapidly since 2000, but does not alone explain the overall increased aid share for basic social services. The analysis further confirms that social sector programmes and sector wide approaches (SWAP’s) are on the rise but still account only form a small portion of total ODA to basic social services although a number of such programmes are targeted specifically to basic services.

This paper is produced alongside Innocenti Report Card 7 Child Well-being in Rich Countries. It provides more detail on how the indicators were chosen for the Report Card, and how they were combined into components and then into dimensions. It also provides additional analysis to complement the Report Card. We started working on this topic in reaction to the cautious approach to indicator development of the Indicators Sub Committee of the European Union Social Protection Committee. The so-called Laeken Primary and Secondary Indicators are not well adjusted to capture children’s well-being and currently only contain child breakdowns for a relative poverty measure and jobless households. Although in the report by Professor Tony Atkinson and colleagues prepared for the Luxembourg Presidency (Atkinson et al., 2005) there was a proposal that children should be ‘mainstreamed’, it was suggested (by the Head of Eurostat) that only one child-related indicator should be added to the Laeken Primary Indicators – on educational achievement. Our aspiration was to demonstrate that much more was possible using already available data. So during the UK Presidency of the EU we set about building an index of child well-being that will be published in Social Indicators Research (Bradshaw, Hoelscher and Richardson, 2006). The EU index is different to the analysis developed in this paper mainly because it exploits European data sources not available for OECD countries. This paper begins in Section 1 with a background review of previous conceptualisations of child wellbeing. Then in Section 2 we develop a framework for the analysis drawing on a rights-based approach; notions of creating of well-being; and ideas about children’s interaction with their environment. Section 3 reviews the methods employed in developing the dimensions. Section 4 presents the results for each dimension. Section 5 is a concluding discussion. There is an appendix containing the raw data.

This paper examines poverty in recent years among children in the countries of South Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The indicator used to measure poverty – current household consumption tested against an absolute poverty threshold of US $2.15 converted at Purchasing Power Parity exchange rates – is found to be robust to sensitivity testing, and to correlate well with non-income indicators of well-being among children. The absolute poverty rate among children is highest where national income is lowest, and where the density of children in the population is highest. The paper analyses two dimensions of child poverty – according to household composition, and according to its urban, rural and regional dimensions. The most important findings from a policy point of view are the strong rural character of child poverty, and the relationship between child population density (at the level of the country, the sub-national region, and the household) and child poverty: where child population shares are higher, child poverty rates are also higher. This relationship, moreover, may have strengthened over time. Child population density needs to be seen more as a trigger to redistribution. In addition, the analysis finds that in some countries, poverty among children of single parents is reduced by their particular patterns of migration and remittance’s flows. However, parental migration to economically support children raises important questions about material wellbeing in relation to other aspects of child well-being. These warrant further analysis.

We compare three EU countries that have recently experienced substantial but very different reforms of their systems to support families with children: Austria, Spain and the United Kingdom. The structure of these systems is different: Austria gives emphasis to universal benefits, Spain to tax concessions and the United Kingdom to means-tested benefits. As a first step the paper compares the distributional implications of these three approaches. The recent reforms have reinforced these existing structures while increasing the amount of public resources directed towards children. The second step is to address the question whether the chosen strategies are the best for each country. What would have happened if instead of reinforcing the existing types of policies these countries had completely transformed the architecture of their systems in either of the other two directions? We use EUROMOD - the European tax-benefit microsimulation model that is designed for making cross-country comparisons and for answering ‘what if’ questions such as these – to explore the effects of alternative budget-neutral reforms. In particular, in addition to assessing the effects of countries’ actual child related reforms from 1998 to 2003, we simulate the substitution (‘swap’) of child related benefits and tax concessions from one country to another. The changes in household disposable income resulting from these reforms are used to assess their impact on the position of children in the income distribution as a whole, the proportions gaining and losing and the effects on child poverty. The analysis of the 1998 and 2003 systems reveal that, in real terms, the average spending per child increased by 31 per cent in Austria (from €169 to €220 per month), 150 per cent in Spain (from €13 to €34), and 71 per cent in the UK (€102 to €174). In Austria and the UK the increase in spending per child is relatively evenly spread over the income distribution, with a slightly lower increase at the top. In Spain the rise in per child spending in the two bottom deciles is negligible, whereas children in the top quintile receive on average more than ten times as much under the 2003 rules as under the 1998 rules. Child poverty rates fall in all countries, but the reductions are particularly significant in the UK (from 32% to 20%) and Austria (12% to 9%). The swap of 2003 child policies allows us to draw some conclusions about the three systems regardless of the country in which they are implemented. On vertical equity grounds, UK policies are the most successful at reducing child poverty in all three countries and using a range of proportions of the median as poverty thresholds. In terms of horizontal equity, the Austrian system generates the highest redistribution from childless individuals to families with children and guarantees, in all countries, the right to a similar level of protection for all children regardless their parent’s income position. On the other hand, with a low expenditure level and a pro-rich distribution, the Spanish policies can hardly meet any equity objective. While there are some important aspects that have not been considered in this study, for example the effect of the alternative systems on parental work incentives and on benefit take-up rates, and the role of in-kind benefits, this study demonstrates the potential of comparing systems of support by ‘swapping’ them between countries. This method using microsimulation allows us to distinguish between the effects of level of spending, the relative importance of policy structure and design, and the differential impacts of policies in particular national contexts.

This paper considers three groups of children affected by international migration: (i) children left behind by international labour migrants from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand; (ii) children of Thai nationals in Japan; and (iii) children brought along by irregular migrants in Malaysia and Thailand. Based on the limited data available from published sources, the paper constructs preliminary estimates of numbers of children involved. It then synthesizes available evidence on problems and opportunities faced by the children, and on policies towards them. There are, however, important gaps in the available evidence. The paper identifies these gaps, and suggests ways in which they might be filled. The paper also makes policy recommendations. The growth of international migration in Southeast Asia has affected significant numbers of children. Some necessarily crude calculations suggest that 3-6 million children have been left behind by Filipino parents working overseas; the equivalent figure for Indonesia is something like one million, and for Thailand half a million. These numbers imply that roughly 10-20 per cent of Filipino children, and 2-3 per cent of Indonesian and Thai children, have a parent overseas. Based on good evidence from the Philippines, and scattered evidence from Indonesia and Thailand, it appears that (i) migration of parents improves the material conditions of the children left behind, which probably flows through to children’s health and schooling, and (ii) the social costs are strongly mitigated by the involvement of the extended family. In the Philippines, but less so in Indonesia and Thailand, governmental and non-governmental organizations already provide a range of services for children and migrants. Meanwhile, in Thailand, there are over 100,000 children of undocumented migrants from Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. There are tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of children of Indonesian migrants in Malaysia. Scattered evidence suggests that these children face much greater difficulties than the children left at home by Filipino, Indonesia, and Thai workers. The children brought along to Thailand and Malaysia appear to be significantly poorer than other children in their host countries, and to have limited access to social services. In Thailand, however, current efforts to register foreign workers and their dependants may lead to improved access, at least in the short term. A number of practical, low-cost policies to address the problems of children left behind by labour migrants from Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines have been suggested or implemented. If further research were to show that particular subgroups, such as those with both parents overseas, suffered special disadvantages, then high-cost interventions for these subgroups might be justified. However, more general high-cost interventions covering all children left behind by labour migrants are not justified on current evidence, since this evidence suggests that children do not appear, on average, to face greater difficulties than other children in the same societies. Attention should instead be focused on children brought along by undocumented migrants. Thailand’s current registration campaigns represent a major policy experiment, and the effects on children need to be carefully monitored. Regulations governing the entry and exit of migrants strongly influence family migration strategies and the ability of parents to maintain contact with their children. These affects need to be taken into account when regulations are designed. For policy purposes, the most important gaps in current knowledge about children left behind by labour migrants probably concern differences among children. For instance, there is still no conclusive evidence on whether children with absent mothers suffer more problems than children with absent fathers. A sensible first stage in filling this gap would be to exploit existing household survey data. Most published research dealing with children of undocumented migrants in Thailand consists of small-scale studies of highly disadvantaged groups such as sex workers. There have been few studies looking at mainstream migrants, or comparing migrants with the surrounding population. The best way to begin such research would be to exploit existing data from the Kanchanaburi Field Station. In Malaysia, a promising source on children of Indonesian migrants is ethnographic work carried out by Malaysian students. More generally, there is a need for research on how immigration regulations affect family migration strategies and the well-being of the children.

This paper offers a descriptive portrait of income poverty among children in Germany between the early 1980s and 2001, with a focus on developments since unification in 1991. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel are used to estimate poverty rates, rates of entry to and exit from poverty, and the duration of time spent in and out of poverty. The analysis focuses upon comparisons between East and West Germany, by family structure, and citizenship status. Child poverty rates have drifted upward since 1991, and have been increasing more than the rates for the overall population since the mid-1990s. In part these changes are due to increasing poverty among children from households headed by noncitizens. Children in single parent households are by all measures at considerable risk of living in poverty. There are also substantial differences in the incidence of child poverty and its dynamics between East and West Germany.

This paper documents levels and changes in child poverty rates in 12 OECD countries using data from the Luxembourg Income Study project, and focusing upon an analysis of the reasons for changes over the 1990s. The objective is to uncover the relative role of income transfers from the state in determining the magnitude and direction of change in child poverty rates, holding other demographic and labour market factors constant. As such the paper offers a cross-country overview of child poverty, changes in child poverty and the impact of public policy in North America and Europe. The paper offers a set of country specific results, and also attempts to draw general lessons. First, family and demographic forces play only a limited role in determining changes in child poverty rates. These forces change only gradually and are limited in their ability to cushion children from detrimental shocks originating in the labour market or in the government sector, which are the sources of the major forces determining the direction of change in child poverty. Second, in countries facing severe economic crises it does not appear that the amount of social transfers available were increased in a way to cushion children from these changes and put a backstop on their risk of low income. Indeed, just the opposite appears to have occurred in countries experiencing the largest increases in child poverty. Third, there is no single road to lower child poverty rates. Changes in income transfers need to be thought through in conjunction with the nature of labour markets. Reforms intended to increase the labour supply and labour market engagement of adults may or may not end up lowering child poverty rates. At the same time increases in the level of support have also been shown to be a central ingredient in lowering the child poverty rate both when it is very high and when it is already quite low. In the majority of the countries analyzed there has been little progress in reducing child poverty rates. Child poverty unambiguously fell in only three of the twelve countries under study, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Norway. In the remaining seven countries child poverty rates were essentially unchanged since 1990 or rose significantly. The analytical approach does not aim to consider the behavioural interactions between the various variables on incomes. Nonetheless the analysis might be seen as a starting point for discussions of the extent to which children in some relatively rich countries have experienced changes in the risk of living in low income given the standards prevailing during the late 1980s and early 1990s.