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Child Well-Being in Advanced Economies in the Late 2000s

Social Indicators Research volume 118, pages 247–283 (2014)Cite this article

Abstract

This paper aimed at comparing the well-being of children across the most economically advanced countries of the world while discussing the methodological issues involved in comparing children’s well-being across countries. A Child Well-being Index was constructed to rank countries according to their performance in advancing child well-being. The Index used 30 indicators combined into 13 components, again summarised in 5 dimensions for 29 rich countries. Data from various sources were combined to capture aspects of child well-being: material well-being, health, education, behaviour and risks, housing and environment. The scores for the countries on all variables and combinations of variables were discussed in detail. The Child Well-being Index revealed that the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries (excluding Denmark) did relatively better than the other countries while Romania and the United States performed well below the average. Overall, serious differences existed in child well-being across countries suggesting that in many, improvement could be made in the quality of children’s lives.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to the practice of Eurostat, the poverty gap is measured as the distance between the poverty line and the median income of the poor population, where the distance is expressed as a percentage of the value of the poverty line.

  2. 2.

    In the Belgium case, the population in the Brussels-Capital Region is considered half Flemish and half French.

  3. 3.

    This indicator measures the annual concentration of fine particulate matter, i.e. particles smaller than 10 microns.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Peter Adamson and Dominic Richardson for their guidance and contributions.

Author information

Affiliations

  1. UNICEF Office of Research, Innocenti Research Centre, Florence, Italy

    Bruno Martorano, Luisa Natali & Chris de Neubourg

  2. University of York, York, UK

    Jonathan Bradshaw

Authors
  1. Bruno Martorano
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  2. Luisa Natali
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  3. Chris de Neubourg
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  4. Jonathan Bradshaw
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bruno Martorano.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 13.

Table 13 Data and sources for all dimensions—late 2000s
Full size table

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Martorano, B., Natali, L., de Neubourg, C. et al. Child Well-Being in Advanced Economies in the Late 2000s. Soc Indic Res 118, 247–283 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-013-0402-z

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Keywords

  • Child well-being
  • Child poverty
  • Health
  • Education
  • Risk behavior