The Breadth of Child Poverty in Europe

Moral, efficiency, and rights-based arguments have sparked widespread acknowledgement in both academic and policy circles that children deserve a special focus in poverty measurement. The European Union (EU) is amongst those bodies that have recognized the need for child-focused indicators in monitoring poverty and social exclusion and is currently in the process of developing, testing and comparing single indicators of child well-being across member states. In this paper we seek to add to this debate by providing a micro-analysis of the breadth of child poverty in the European Union, considering both the degree of overlap and accumulation of deprivations across monetary and multidimensional indicators of poverty. The objective of this paper is to conduct an overlap analysis of child deprivation in the EU to gain insight into the breadth of child poverty and degree of overlap between measures of monetary and multidimensional poverty. Particular attention will be paid to investigate cross-country and cross-domain differences. Using the 2007 wave of the EU-SILC data, we compare the European Union (EU) monetary 'at-risk-of-poverty' indicator to a range of child deprivation indicators at domain level in four EU Member States (Germany, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom). Overall, the paper‟s findings provide a strong call for the need to take a multidimensional approach towards the measurement of child poverty in the EU context.