INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP

Impact of Poverty and Social Exclusion on Children’s Lives and their Well-being

8th – 9th September 2008Bratislava

CHILD POVERTY – A MULTIDIMENSIONAL MEASUREMENT

Amélia Bastos

School of Economics and Management

Technical University of Lisbon

Carla Machado

School of Economics and Management

CEMAPRE CEMAPRE

Technical University of Lisbon

Outline

Motivation

Methodological framework

Results from the empirical analysis

Consequences derived from the principal findings

1

2

3

4

Motivation1

Dimension of child poverty

Consequences of living in poverty for children

Ethics and social justice

Methodological framework – 1/22

Data: 5000 observations

Child – statistical unit of analysis

Child poverty: multidimensional concept

Material and non-material issues

Deprivation – domains: Education, Health, Housing and Social Integration

Fuzzy conceptualization – Fuzzy Set Theory

Methodological framework – 2/22

Measures of child poverty

Composite Index of Deprivation

Risk of Deprivation

Evaluation of socio-demographic and economic attributes – Probit model

3Results from the empirical analysis - 1/3

Composite Index of Deprivation (CID)

Social Integration is the domain that most contributes to child deprivation

Education is on the opposite side

Housing 25,9%

Health25,8%

Education 20,6%

Social Integration

27,7%

Having illiterate parents

CID by socio-demographic attributes emphasizes the importance of:

Being black

Living in lone parent’s families

Living without any of the parents

3Results from the empirical analysis - 2/3

Deprived children: deprivation pattern and attributes evaluation

3Results from the empirical analysis - 3/3

CID by economic attributes emphasizes the importance of:

Living with unemployed parents

Having parents with low professional occupations

Being income poor

Deprivation risk

20% of children are at-risk-of-deprivation

Importance of measures targeted to specific groups

Deprivation and income poverty do not overlap

Importance of the child-cantered analysis

Consequences derived from the principal findings4