Child Indicators Research

, Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 855–872 | Cite as

A Comparative Study on the Level of Realizing Children’s Rights: A Focus on Rich Countries

Article
First Online:
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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.

Keywords

Comparative study Children’s rights Composite index 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Social WelfareKorea National University of TransportationJeungpyeongSouth Korea
  2. 2.Social Welfare Research CenterSeoul National UniversitySeoulSouth Korea

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