Child Indicators Research

, Volume 5, Issue 2, pp 335–355 | Cite as

A New Tool for Monitoring (Child) Poverty: Measures of Cumulative Deprivation

Article
First Online:
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Abstract

Governments’ social indicator portfolios have expanded taking the multidimensionality of poverty into account. However, few if any, of the indicators provide insight into the degree to which persons experience several unfavourable conditions at the same time. This paper reviews and tests various indicators of cumulative deprivation that can be used to monitor child poverty and to identify vulnerable groups of children. This paper studies headcounts (counting deprived individuals) and adjusted headcounts (counting deprivations of deprived individuals) while the cumulative threshold can be distribution dependent (relative) or not (absolute). The measures are empirically tested on the 2007 EU-SILC data for the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the Netherlands. The findings indicate that the absolute adjusted headcount with a cumulative threshold of one deprivation is the most attractive candidate: it has an intuitive interpretation; it is sensitive to the breadth of deprivations but not oversensitive to changes in the methodology.

Keywords

Poverty measurement Multidimensional poverty Material deprivation Cumulative deprivation Child poverty 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

This project was undertaken in affiliation with the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance, Maastricht University, as part of an EU-SILC research project. Part of this research was funded by the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre (IRC) in Florence. The research was first published online as an Innocenti Working Paper entitled ‘Monitoring Child Well-being in the European Union: Measuring cumulative deprivation’, IWP 2011-03 (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre: www.unicef-irc.org/publications/635). We thank Marie-Hélène L’Heureux, Jessica Breaugh, Julie Charest, Genie Wu and Kirsten Davis for their contributions to this research project. We also thank Leonardo Menchini, the participants at the Innocenti research seminar and two anonymous referees for their feedback.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Graduate School of Public and International AffairsUniversity of OttawaOntarioCanada
  2. 2.Institute of Development StudiesUniversity of SussexBrightonUK

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