In a time of general prosperity, more than 69 million children live in poverty in some of the world’s richest countries. Poverty is often defined by income. But for most children, poverty is about more than just money. It is about growing up in a home without enough heat or nutritious food. Poverty means no new clothes, no telephone and no money for a birthday celebration. For the eighteenth edition of the Innocenti Report Card, UNICEF Innocenti examined child poverty in the high-income and upper middle-income countries in the European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This Report Card provides an assessment of the current state of child poverty and the progress – or lack of progress – that these countries made towards eliminating it.

For the last 20 years, the Innocenti Report Card series has led the way in comparing children’s well-being across rich countries. Report Card 16 develops this further through a multi-level approach to show that children’s well-being is influenced by children’s own actions and relationships, by the networks and resources of their caregivers, and by public policies and the national context. This approach is aligned with the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, in that it recognizes the responsibilities of governments, families and communities to help realize children’s rights and promote their well-being.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed by the international community in 2015 represent an ambitious effort to set a global agenda for development that is both equitable and sustainable, in social, economic and environmental terms. The earlier Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) prioritized the reduction of poverty, as well as progress in related social indicators. The 17 goals of the SDGs add to this a series of outcomes associated with inequality, economic development, the environment and climate change, as well as peace and security. In contrast to the MDGs, which primarily applied to low- and middle-income countries, the ambitious agenda of the SDGs is of necessity universal; it thus applies to rich countries, as well as poor.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) - Innocenti Research Centre Report Card series provokes debate on child well-being in wealthy countries. It provides an important tool to address critical issues affecting disadvantaged children in the industrialized world. Since 2000, the Centre has released nine issues of the series, each addressing different aspects of the living conditions of children and adolescents. All the Report Cards are built around a league table, ranking countries according to their performance on a key child indicator or group of indicators. This issue investigates poverty and vulnerability among children in rich countries.

A great change is coming over childhood in the world’s richest countries. Today’s rising generation is the first in which a majority are spending a large part of early childhood in some form of out-of-home child care. At the same time, neuroscientific research is demonstrating that loving, stable, secure, and stimulating relationships with caregivers in the earliest months and years of life are critical for every aspect of a child’s development. Taken together, these two developments confront public and policymakers in countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with urgent questions. Whether the child care transition will represent an advance or a setback for today’s children and tomorrow’s world, will depend on the response.

This Review finds that the proportion of children living in poverty has risen in a majority of the world’s developed economies for which data are available. No matter which of the commonly-used poverty measures is applied, the situation of children is seen to have deteriorated over the last decade. Allowing the kind of poverty that denies a child the opportunities that most children consider normal is a breach of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Reducing child poverty is also a measure of progress towards social cohesion, equality of opportunity, and investment in both today’s children and tomorrow’s world.

This publication monitors the performance of industrialized countries in meeting the needs of their children. Using data from two different surveys of students in twenty-four OECD countries, it presents the big picture of how well each country’s educational system is performing when measured by (a) what portion of students fall below given benchmarks of educational achievement and (b) at what point the lowest achieving pupils fall behind the national average.In addition, the publication analyzes league tables ranking the performance of rich nations against critical indicators of child well-being and discusses similarities between educational outcomes across OECD countries.

This second Innocenti Report Card focuses on child death by injury in the member countries of the OECD. It presents, for the first time, a standardized league table ranking 26 of the world’s richest nations according to their injury death rates for children aged 1 to 14. Even though child injury death rates have been falling for more than two decades, it would be wrong to conclude that the problem is simply going away. International comparisons in this publication dramatically demonstrate that most countries still have a long way to go. It is hoped that this report will be a cause for a policy change leading to further reductions in child injuries.