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Comparison of Child Poverty Measures: Looking for Consensus

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Abstract

There are various child poverty measures. Child poverty can be observed indirectly from resources perspectives and the direct concept of poverty, focusing on outcomes. The differences in child poverty concepts contribute to the variation of child poverty measures. This paper reports a comparison of three child poverty methodologies: monetary and multidimensional child poverty (absolute and relative deprivation). For this purpose, Indonesia was selected as a case study. The paper uses Indonesian family Life survey (IFLS) data wave 5 that was collected in 2015. The comparison was conducted using the combination of cross-tabulation, the analysis of sensitivity, specificity and predicted values and receiver operating characteristics curves. The comparison confirms that each method informs child poverty differently. There are small overlaps among the measures, and relative deprivation seems to be a ‘better’ measure for Indonesian context.

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Acknowledgements

Major component of this research was performed as part of Erlangga Agustino Landiyanto’s PhD study, for which He received a scholarship from Lembaga Pengelola Dana Pendidikan (LPDP), the Republic of Indonesia. LPDP had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The author would like to express gratitude to Patricia Lucas, Sebnem Eroglu -Hawksworth, Demi Patsios, Dave Gordon, Hector Najera Catalan (University of Bristol) and Andy Sumner (Kings College, London), Shaileen Nandy (Cardiff University), Arip Muttaqien (ASEAN Secretariat), Taufik Hidayat (TNP2K) and participants of seminars in University of Bristol and University of Leeds for any support, discussion and feedback during various stages of the PhD study.

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Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education /Lembaga Pengelola Dana Pendidikan (LPDP).

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  1. Research Institute of Socio-Economic Development (RISED) and Faculty of Business and Economics of Airlangga University, Surabaya, Indonesia

    Erlangga Agustino Landiyanto

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Landiyanto, E.A. Comparison of Child Poverty Measures: Looking for Consensus. Child Ind Res 15, 35–66 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-021-09867-4

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