Abstract
The primary purposes of the paper is to construct a children’s rights index (CRI) for measuring the level of realizing children’s rights in economically rich countries and to compare the level of children’s rights across economically rich countries. We use three domains to represent children’s rights in advanced countries in order to measure children’s rights: right to welfare, right to education, and right to health. Each domain is composed of three types of indicators: public efforts, basic needs fulfillment, and present condition. In a comparative analysis, we found variations in children’s rights between economically rich countries. We also found that the patterns of children’s rights are highly achieved in an advanced welfare state. The results suggest that economic inequality is important for realizing children’s rights while the ratification of a human rights treaty has a limited effect on children’s rights. We conclude that governmental efforts to create an equal society are key factors for realizing children’s rights. Therefore, countries need to develop plans to confront economic inequality in order to achieve improved children’s rights for the future.
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Notes
Our index is redefined from four types of rights into three types such as survival, protection, and development. However, we do not have indicators that represent participation rights. We reckon that a method to measure participation rights or how to select proxy indicators for participation rights is not clear. This is a critical limitation of this study.
This relationship is possibly caused because we included the ‘child poverty rate indicator’ and the right to welfare domain. The child poverty rate is highly correlated with inequality. However, inequality is still correlated with other domains such as the right to health even stronger. Thus, we can conclude that inequality affects children’s rights and children’s well-being across economically advanced countries.
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An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Social Policy Association, July 14-16, 2014 and we thank participants at that conference for very helpful feedback, in particular, Jonathan Bradshaw and Gill Main. This research was supported by a grant from the Asan Foundation.
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Kim, S.S., Yoo, M.S. A Comparative Study on the Level of Realizing Children’s Rights: A Focus on Rich Countries. Child Ind Res 9, 855–872 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-015-9344-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-015-9344-0