Child poverty: phenomenon and characteristics

Child poverty, food insecurity, and respiratory health during the COVID-19 pandemic

This chapter examines the limitations and flaws of the welfare program, and suggests different approaches to solving child poverty that have been used in most of the other industrialized nations of Europe, Australia, and elsewhere. The two central approaches to reducing child poverty that have been used in most other industrialized nations are effective child support collection and a progressive children's allowance. The United States has among the worst record in the world in terms of assuring child support collection. This problem is particularly important for poor and low-income children. If the United States were to adopt child support collection approaches used in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, it could cut child poverty rates in half. Furthermore, if the United States were to adopt a progressive children's allowance as is found in most other countries, it could further substantially cut child poverty.

Examining the Spatial Structural Determinants of Child Poverty in Nigeria

During the 1990s, a number of countries in both North America and Europe set explicit targets for the reduction of child poverty, including the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Canada. In the United Kingdom, the pledge, announced in 1999, was to eliminate child poverty in a generation; in Canada, the ambition, made clear a decade earlier, was to seek to do the same by the year 2000. And even in countries less explicit about their goals, reducing child poverty has been an important public policy concern. This, for example, is as true in the United States, where child poverty rates have historically been among the highest relative to other rich countries, as it is in Sweden, where they have been among the lowest. Clearly, this issue has a strong resonance in public policy discourse, and reflects a growing concern over the welfare of all children regardless of their place in the income distribution. But why should societies care more about children than any other group? One possible reason is that children have certain rights as citizens, but are dependent upon others for the defense of their rights. This may certainly be the case, but another reason – one often explicitly made by advocates – is instrumental: children should be thought of as investments in the future. This argument suggests that in the long run the productivity of the economy and the well-being of all citizens would be higher if the well-being of children were improved, and in particular if child poverty were reduced.

Relative child poverty rose sharply over the period 1979–97/98 and has since fallen by about half a million (4 percentage points). Absolute poverty changed little between 1979 and 1997/98 but has fallen sharply since then. Absolute poverty fell by 1.7 million between 1997/98 and 2001/02, with a half million fall in the last year alone. Changes in work patterns, wages and demographics all contributed to rising relative child poverty between 1979 and 1997/98. Demographics and work changes were responsible for the rise in absolute poverty. Benefit changes offset some of these increases. The absence of work was particularly severe on children in lone parent families. The Blair government’s welfare reforms raised work incentives and resulted in more work among low income families with children. These increases in work had modest effects in reducing child poverty and much of the reduction is attributable to benefit changes — work itself is not enough to pull many families over the poverty line. The Clinton administration introduced a range of welfare to work reforms in the US, increasing aid to those in work but cutting it to those out of work. Child poverty there has fallen but not as sharply. Increased work and demographic change have been the driving forces in poverty reductions. Median incomes, and hence the poverty line have increased rapidly and in conjunction further small increases in wage inequality and demographic shifts have meant that the government is making slower progress in reducing relative poverty than anticipated. While much progress has been made, current and planned policy reforms may not raise the incomes of the poor enough relative to median income to achieve the sort of poverty reductions needed to meet the stated poverty targets.

Subject. This article discusses the economic opportunities of households and the issues of population welfare. Objectives. The article aims to identify the main causes of child poverty and analyze the programmes implemented in the Samara Oblast to support various population groups. Methods. For the study, I used statistical, dynamic, structural, and comparative analyses. Results. The article finds that a significant number of households with children fall into the low-income category in the Samara Oblast. There are many factors affecting the level of child poverty. The article emphasizes that strengthening the targeting of social assistance, improving the social contract system, and digitizing social services should be the main areas for developing social policy to alleviate child poverty. Conclusions. The proposed measures implementation can help improve the efficiency of the social assistance system, reduce child poverty, and improve the quality of life for families with children.

Improving Our Children's Health Is an Investment Priority.

This paper presents a new approach to child poverty measurement that reflects the breadth and components of child poverty. The Alkire and Foster method presented in this paper seeks to answer the question “who is poor” by considering the intensity of each child’s poverty. Once children are identified as poor, the measures aggregate information on poor children’s deprivations in a way that can be broken down to see where and how children are poor. The resulting measures go beyond the headcount by taking into account the breadth, depth or severity of dimensions of child poverty. The paper illustrates one way to apply this method to child poverty measurement, using Bangladeshi data from four rounds of the Demographic Health Survey covering the period 1997-2007. Results for Bangladesh show that the AF adjusted headcount ratio adds value because it produces a different ranking than the simple headcount, because it also reflects the simultaneous deprivations children experience (intensity). Given this, we argue that child poverty should not be assessed only according to the incidence of poverty but also by the intensity of deprivations that batter poor children’s lives at the same time. The Bangladesh example is used to illustrate how to compute and interpret the child poverty figures, how the final measure can be broken down by groups and by dimensions in order to analyse child poverty, how to interpret changes over time, and how to undertake robustness checks concerning the poverty cut-off.

Now, more than ever, it is crucial to address the topic of children and poverty in the U.S., given current scientific knowledge about poverty's influence on children and effective strategies to mitigate its negative impact. In this report, we summarize the best available information on definitions and trends in child poverty, policy responses to child poverty and the impact of poverty on children's health and development. Research suggests that various factors exert upward and downward pressure on child poverty rates. Upward pressure is exerted by declining work rates for men, stagnant wages for low-wage workers, increasing rates of children raised in female-headed households, and growing gaps in educational attainment. Downward pressure is exerted by the U.S. system of antipoverty policies and programs, which appears to be cutting "pre-transfer" poverty rates by more than 50%. Nonetheless, child poverty rates in the United States are high by both historical and international comparison. We then review the emerging science on biological and ecological processes by which poverty affects child development and key findings regarding the efficacy of comprehensive strategies to reduce poverty and to promote the human capital development of poor children. In the final section, we reflect on implications for moving forward in science and policy.

The National Income Dynamics Study offers important new opportunities for exploring the dynamics of poverty in South Africa. This paper provides a largely descriptive overview of the situation of children in South Africa, drawing on the first wave of the panel study. It finds that children and households with children remain disproportionately represented in rural areas under traditional authority, and that children have proportionately lower levels of access to services and adequate living environments than adults. Many children live in households where their parents are absent, for a range of reasons including orphaning and adult migration. These children are cared for almost entirely by relatives, highlighting the importance of extended kinship networks in providing family care, particularly in the context of high mortality and labour migration rates. The income poverty analysis applies a range of poverty lines and finds that children are, on average, poorer than adults. Even using a relatively low poverty line equivalent to R515 per month in 2008, two thirds of children live in income poverty, and this rate increases substantially for children in rural areas. The severity of child poverty is related to the fact that over a third of children live in households where no adults are employed. While social grants are critical for reducing poverty levels, the widest reaching grant – the Child Support Grant – makes a relatively small impact on child poverty because the amount of the grant is set very low. Larger grants, such as the Old Age Pension and Disability Grants, have a far greater effect on reducing child poverty even though they are not intended for children.

This paper examines the effectiveness and efficiency of welfare programmes that are relevant to child poverty reduction in Hong Kong. We employ data from a cross‐sectional survey of a representative sample of families, conducted in 2015 through face‐to‐face interviews. Our results indicate that all four welfare programmes were inadequate in alleviating child poverty. This was either due to the deep poverty gap to be filled or high rates of exclusion error. Most programmes are also inefficient because of inclusion error. We conclude by suggesting some policy implications for the welfare programmes.

The replacement of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) with a child allowance has been advocated by numerous policymakers and researchers. We estimate the anti-poverty, targeting, and labor supply effects of such a change by linking survey data with administrative tax and government program data which form part of the Comprehensive Income Dataset (CID). We focus on the provisions of the 2021 Build Back Better Act, which would have increased maximum benefit amounts to $3,000 or $3,600 per child (up from $2,000 per child) and made the full credit available to all low and middle-income families regardless of earnings or income. Initially ignoring any behavioral responses, we estimate that the replacement of the CTC would reduce child poverty by 34% and deep child poverty by 39%. The change to a child allowance would have a larger anti-poverty effect on children than any existing government program, though at a higher cost per child raised above the poverty line than any other means-tested program. Relatedly, the child allowance would allocate a smaller share of its total dollars to families at the bottom of the income distribution-as well as families with the lowest levels of long-term income, education, or health-than any existing means-tested program with the exception of housing assistance. We then simulate anti-poverty effects accounting for labor supply responses. By replacing the CTC (which contained substantial work incentives akin to the EITC) with a child allowance, the policy change would reduce the return to working at all by at least $2,000 per child for most workers with children. Relying on elasticity estimates consistent with mainstream simulation models and the academic literature, we estimate that this change in policy would lead 1.5 million workers (constituting 2.6% of all working parents) to exit the labor force. The decline in employment and the consequent earnings loss would mean that child poverty would only fall by at most 22% and deep child poverty would not fall at all with the policy change.

The rate of child poverty in the United States is higher now than in 1966. Children are the poorest age group and are more likely to be poor than children in other industrial economies. The level and trends in child poverty are analyzed; the major American income support policies for children, including recent reforms of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, are described; and the impact of those policies on poverty are evaluated. Alternate strategies for reducing child poverty, including an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, child support system reforms, and a medical insurance plan, are proposed. Pragmatic, administratively feasible policies exist that can substantially reduce child poverty without significant new government spending.

In low-income and middle-income countries, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, the COVID-19 pandemic has had substantial implications for women's wellbeing. Policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the gendered aspect of pandemics; however, addressing the gendered implications of the COVID-19 pandemic comprehensively and effectively requires a planetary health perspective that embraces systems thinking to inequalities. This Viewpoint is based on collective reflections from research done by the authors on COVID-19 responses by international and regional organisations, and national governments, in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa between June, 2020, and June, 2021. A range of international and regional actors have made important policy recommendations to address the gendered implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on women's health and wellbeing since the start of the pandemic. However, national-level policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have been partial and inconsistent with regards to gender in both sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, largely failing to recognise the multiple drivers of gendered health inequalities. This Viewpoint proposes that addressing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on women in low-income and middle-income countries should adopt a systems thinking approach and be informed by the question of who is affected as opposed to who is infected. In adopting the systems thinking approach, responses will be more able to recognise and address the direct gendered effects of the pandemic and those that emerge indirectly through a combination of long-standing structural inequalities and gendered responses to the pandemic.

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.