Child Poverty in Vietnam: Providing Insights Using a Country-Specific and Multidimensional Model

Despite a wide under-prioritization, the issue of child poverty has received increasing attention worldwide over the last decade. The acknowledgement in Vietnam that child-specific poverty measurement is crucial for poverty efforts directed towards children, and the current lack thereof, instigated the development of a Vietnam child poverty approach. This paper proposes a country-specific, multidimensional and outcome-based approach for the measurement of the incidence, depth and severity of child poverty. It does so at the level of the individual child using household survey data. The development of such an approach at the level of the individual child presents an appropriate alternative for or supplement to the widely used monetary poverty approach, allowing for the use of compatible analytical methods. Findings suggest that 37% of all children in Vietnam live in poverty, with the most pressing areas of deprivation being water, sanitation and leisure. We do not find evidence for a gender bias but do observe a large urban–rural divide, regional disparities and large ethnic inequalities. We argue that this tailor-made approach is a valuable new tool for policy makers and analysts in Vietnam as it enables identification and analysis of poor children, their characteristics and most pressing areas of deprivation within the country’s specific social and cultural context.     

When Twenty-Four Hours is not Enough: Time Poverty of Working Parents

Individuals can be money poor, time poor or both. While income is the most used indicator of poverty, broader indexes including non-monetary aspects of deprivation have been proposed and measured. As one such measure, our study focuses on the element of deprivation arising from the time deficit of many working people. The usual poverty threshold is calculated as the amount of income to buy the minimum required goods and services from the market. This minimum required purchase is greater for these people since they have less time than the average person to produce some goods and services for themselves at home. So, they need money to buy these in the market in order to maintain the same consumption. The income standard must be supplemented to adequately measure actual poverty. Time use data make it possible to establish time requirements and time availability and provide a measure of time poverty. Using Canadian GSS 1998 data, and building on the work of Vickery (1977, ‚The time poor: A new look at poverty’, The Journal of Human Resources 12(1), pp. 27-48) and of Douthitt (1993, ‚The inclusion of time availability in Canadian poverty measures’, Time-Use Methodology: Toward Consensus (ISTAT, Roma), pp. 83–91), and our own previous study, we estimate time-adjusted poverty thresholds and rates for single and dual parent Canadian families. As expected, we have found high incidence of time deficit among the employed single parents with children. We make a case for the acceptance of a redefined poverty standard for such time-deprived groups.     

Monitoring Progress in Child Poverty Reduction: Methodological Insights and Illustration to the Case Study of Bangladesh

Important steps have been taken at international summits to set up goals and targets to improve the wellbeing of children worldwide. Now the world also has more and better data to monitor progress. This paper presents a new approach to monitoring progress in child poverty reduction based on the Alkire and Foster adjusted headcount ratio and an array of complementary techniques. A theoretical discussion is accompanied by an assessment of child poverty reduction in Bangladesh based on four rounds of the demographic household survey (1997–2007). Emphasis is given to dimensional monotonicity and decomposability as desirable properties of multidimensional poverty measures. Complementary techniques for analysing changes over time are also illustrated, including the Shapley decomposition of changes in overall poverty, as well as a range of robustness tests and statistical significance tests. The results from Bangladesh illustrate the value added of these new tools and the information they provide for policy. The analysis reveals two paths to multidimensional poverty reduction by either decreasing the incidence of poverty or its intensity, and exposes an uneven distribution of national gains across geographical divisions. The methodology allows an integrated analysis of overall changes yet simultaneously examines progress in each region and in each dimension, retaining the positive features of dashboard approaches. The empirical evidence highlights the need to move beyond the headcount ratio towards new measures of child poverty that reflect the intensity of poverty and multiple deprivations that affect poor children at the same time.     

Measuring Child Poverty in Hong Kong: Sensitivity to the Choice of Equivalence Scale

In September 2013, the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region established Hong Kong’s first official poverty line. The new poverty line is used as a major yardstick in social welfare policy formulation and in the allocation of public resources aimed at combating poverty; despite its importance, however, its robustness has not been examined. Using data from the 2011 Population Census, we examined the robustness of the official poverty line in measuring child poverty in Hong Kong through assessing the sensitivity of child poverty measures to the choice of different equivalence scales. The results show that the child poverty profile in Hong Kong is generally not sensitive to the choice of equivalence scale and that the official poverty line correctly identifies those children who live in poverty. Rates of child poverty among boys and girls of different ages, with different family backgrounds and living in households with different compositions, were calculated and ranked using different equivalence scales; these rankings were found to be very similar to those yielded by the official poverty measure. Thus, the choice of adult equivalence scale does not favour any subgroup. We also examined the child poverty profile in Hong Kong based on the official poverty measure and with our 2011 census data. We found that the children in our sample were more likely than the adults to live in poverty household; that more than half of the children who lived in poverty belonged to working poor families; and that children living in public housing were particularly likely to suffer from severe poverty. In light of these findings, we urge the government to prioritise taking measures aimed at lifting children out of poverty.     

Measuring Child Poverty in South Africa: Sensitivity to the Choice of Equivalence Scale and an Updated Profile

This paper offers evidence on the sensitivity of child poverty in South Africa to changes in the adult equivalence scale (AES) and updates the child poverty profile based on the Income and Expenditure Survey 2005/06. Setting the poverty line at the 40th percentile of households calculated with different AESs the scope and composition of child poverty are found to be relatively insensitive to the scale used. The rankings of children of different ages, girls versus boys, racial groupings and children living in rural versus urban areas are unaffected by choice of AES, although some provincial rankings on the poverty headcount measure are. The proportions of children and households ‘correctly’ identified as poor for the full range of scales is extremely high. These findings support the argument that it may be appropriate for profiling poverty in South Africa to use a poverty line based on a per capita welfare measure. For the construction of the child poverty profile, per capita income is used as the welfare indicator with the poverty line set at the 40th percentile of household. The profile suggests that poverty amongst children is more extensive than amongst the population or adults even after the massive injection of transfers into households with poor children through the child support grant. The child poverty headcount, depth and severity are all highest amongst children age 0–4 and lowest amongst those aged 15–17, who are not yet beneficiaries of the grants. They are also highest amongst African and Coloured children. Large variations across provinces remain. The analysis underlines the importance of prioritising children in the fight against poverty, particularly in their earliest years.     

The Multidimensionality of Child Poverty: Evidence from Afghanistan

This paper examines multidimensional poverty among children in Afghanistan using the Alkire-Foster method. Several previous studies have underlined the need to separate children from their adult nexus when studying poverty and treat them according to their own specificities. From the capability approach, child poverty is understood to be the lack of freedom to do and to be what children themselves value and have reason to value. The case of Afghanistan is particularly relevant as years of conflict aggravated by several severe droughts, political insecurity, bad governance and ongoing violence have significantly increased poverty in the country. The paper discusses the relevant dimensions when analysing child poverty and uses data from a survey carried out by Handicap International which contains information on dimensions of children’s wellbeing that is typically missing in standard surveys. Ten dimension are considered in this paper: health, care and love, material deprivation, food security, social inclusion, education, freedom from economic and non-economic exploitation, shelter and environment, autonomy, and mobility. Our results show that younger children, those living in rural areas, girls and disabled children are the most deprived.     

Poverty and Old Age in Scandinavia: A Problem of Gendered Injustice? Evidence from the 2010 GERDA Survey in Finland and Sweden

Material deprivation is represented in different forms and manifestations. Two individuals with the same deprivation score (i.e. number of deprivations), for instance, are likely to be unable to afford or access entirely or partially different sets of goods and services, while one individual may fail to purchase clothes and consumer durables and another one may lack access to healthcare and be deprived of adequate housing. As such, the number of possible patterns or combinations of multiple deprivation become increasingly complex for a higher number of indicators. Given this difficulty, there is interest in poverty research in understanding multiple deprivation, as this analysis might lead to the identification of meaningful population sub-groups that could be the subjects of specific policies. This article applies a factor mixture model (FMM) to a real dataset and discusses its conceptual and empirical advantages and disadvantages with respect to other methods that have been used in poverty research. The exercise suggests that FMM is based on more sensible assumptions (i.e. deprivation covary within each class), provides valuable information with which to understand multiple deprivation and is useful to understand severity of deprivation and the additive properties of deprivation indicators.     

Income and Beyond: Multidimensional Poverty in Six Latin American Countries

This paper studies multidimensional poverty for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico and Uruguay for the period 1992–2006. The approach overcomes the limitations of the two traditional methods of poverty analysis in Latin America (income-based and unmet basic needs) by combining income with five other dimensions: school attendance for children, education of the household head, sanitation, water and shelter. The results allow a fuller understanding of the evolution of poverty in the selected countries. Over the study period, El Salvador, Brazil, Mexico and Chile experienced significant reductions in multidimensional poverty. In contrast, in urban Uruguay there was a small reduction in multidimensional poverty, while in urban Argentina the estimates did not change significantly. El Salvador, Brazil and Mexico, and rural areas of Chile display significantly higher and more simultaneous deprivations than urban areas of Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. In all countries, deprivation in access to proper sanitation and education of the household head are the highest contributors to overall multidimensional poverty.     

Poverty,Inequality and Deprivation in South Africa: An Analysis of the 1993 SALDRU Survey

This paper analyses poverty and inequality in South Africa based on data from a comprehensive multi-purpose household survey undertaken in 1993 to provide baseline statistics on poverty and its determinants to the new government. The paper shows that South Africa has among the highest levels of income inequality in the world and compares poorly in most social indicators to countries with similar income levels. Much of the poverty in the country is a direct result of apartheid policies that denied equal access to education, employment, services, and resources to the black population of the country. As a result, poverty has a very strong racial dimension with poverty concentrated among the African population. In addition, poverty is much higher in rural areas, and particularly high in the former homelands. Poverty among female-headed households and among children is also higher than average. Moreover, poverty is closely related to poor education and lack of employment. The poor suffer from lack of access to education, quality health care, basic infrastructure, transport, are heavily indebted, have little access to productive resources, and are heavily dependent on remittances and social transfers, particularly social pensions and disability grants. The paper uses an income-based definition of poverty for most of the analysis. In addition, it develops a broad-based index of deprivation including income, employment, wealth, access to services, health, education, and perceptions of satisfaction as its components. While on average the two indicators correspond fairly closely, the income poverty measure misses a considerable number of people who are severely deprived in many of the non-income measures of well-being. This group of severely deprived not identified by the income poverty measure consists predominantly of Africans living in rural areas, concentrated particularly in the province of KwaZulu/Natal.     

The effects of child health on marital status and family structure

The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence on the effect of child health on marital stability and family structure in an economic framework. We use the 1988 National Health Interview Survey's Child Health Supplement, with a sample of about 9,000 families, to test whether having an unhealthy child decreases the mother's chance of being married and whether it increases her chance of living in an extended family. Using two different measures of child health, we find that having an unhealthy child decreases the mother's likelihood of being married. Our results imply that children in poor health are more likely to face obstacles beyond their illness because they also are more likely to suffer the consequences of poverty and the poor schooling outcomes that result from being raised in a female-headed household. The only mitigating factor is that unhealthy white children are more likely than their healthy counterparts to be living in an extended family.     

The International Child Poverty Gap: Does Demography Matter?

According to the Luxembourg Income Study data, the U.S. child poverty rate is the second highest among 15 high-income nations. The present work reveals that 55% of all American children living in a household headed by a single female with no other adult present live in poverty-the highest rate for any of the five living arrangements in the 15 countries examined in this study. While previous analyses have focused on market forces and governmental redistribution across households, we question the contribution of demographic factors that place children in family structures with different poverty risks relative to other factors such as differential market opportunities and governmental benefits for adults caring for children in various living arrangements. Applying a classic demographic decomposition technique to the overall poverty gap, we find that the distributional effect of demographic behavior contributes little to the U.S. poverty gap with other nations (and none with respect to the United Kingdom). Overall differences in labor markets and welfare schemes best explain the U.S. child poverty gap, although for some countries, the gap is accentuated by the gradient of governmental transfers, and for most countries, by the gradient of market earnings across living arrangements.     

Child development and family resources: Evidence from the second generation of the 1958 British birth cohort

Studies of American and recently British children suggest that there is a link between family income and child development, in particular that one consequence of child poverty is to hold back cognitive development. This paper investigates the impact of family income, material deprivation, maternal education and child-rearing behaviour on an indicator of cognitive functioning, using British data on children aged 6 to 17 whose mothers are members of the 1958 Birth Cohort Study. The poorer average cognitive functioning among children from the lowest income groups could largely be accounted for, statistically, by the greater material disadvantage of these groups. These analyses provide evidence to suggest that low income has detrimental effects on children's cognitive functioning through the operation of longer-term material disadvantage, and that these effects may be mitigated by positive parental behaviours. Received: 31 July 1999/Accepted: 26 September 2000     

Social Structure and Child Poverty

Child poverty, as a critical indicator of the QOL, is intricately related to the social structure of the community. This hypothesis is explored for the 159 counties of Georgia for the year 2000. The influence of demographic, economic, family and health factors upon child poverty are explored through models of total, black and white child poverty. Factor analyses of factors uncovered by the models identify the social-structural features of counties in relation to child poverty. Counties considered “Deprived/rural” harbor child poverty, while counties described as “Business/money” and “Progressive/urban” bear a negative relationship to child poverty. Positively associated with child poverty are residential stability, unemployment, low educational achievement, youth and age dependency, single-parent female household heads with children, grandparent child care, and health disability of child, elders and of working-age persons. Structural factors militating against child poverty are persons with greater education, higher population density, out migration, larger married population, higher retail sales, larger middle class families, higher weekly wages, and other structural features of the county.     

Welfare State Development,Individual Deprivations and Income Inequality: A Cross-Country Analysis in Latin America and the Caribbean

Several scholars have confirmed the role that the welfare state (WS) plays in reducing poverty, promoting equality and ensuring the common wellbeing. One of the limitations of the scholarship has been the conceptualization and operationalization of the WS and poverty as one-dimensional variables. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between welfare state development, single-dimensions deprivations and income inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean, before and after controlling for demographic and cyclical factors. The WS is operationalized as a one-dimensional variable, but also taking into account its multidimensional nature. Three individual deprivations suffered by people on poverty and two income inequality indicators are used as dependent variables. Three pooled time-series cross-section regression analyses with panel-corrected standard errors models were carried out on 18 countries in the region around 2000, 2005 and 2010. This paper shows that the development of social-welfare programs and institutions seems to be an effective way of tackling individual deprivations suffered by people on poverty in the region. On the other hand, the WS development didn’t appear to be effective to reduce income inequality. The outcomes of welfare institutions appear to be the pivotal dimension to reduce income inequality and income deprivations in the region.     

Multi-Dimensional Deprivation in the U.S.

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of multidimensional deprivation in the U.S. since the Great Recession, from 2008 to 2013. We estimate a Multidimensional Deprivation Index by compiling individual level data on several well-being dimensions from the American Community Survey. Our results indicate that the proportion of the population that is multidimensional deprived averages about 15 percent, which exceeds the prevalence of official income poverty. Lack of education, severe housing burden and lack of health insurance were some of the dimensions in which Americans were most deprived in. Though deprivation increased during the recession, it trended towards a decline between 2010 and 2013. Unlike the official and the supplemental poverty measure which did not show any decline, the deprivation index better reflects the economic recovery since the recession. Overall, the prevalence of deprivation was higher in the southern and the western states and among the Asian and the Hispanic population. Importantly, there was not much overlap between individuals who were income poor and those who were multidimensional deprived. In fact, almost 30 % of individuals with incomes slightly above the poverty threshold experienced multiple deprivations. Our analysis underscores the need to look beyond income based poverty statistics in order to fully realize the impact of the recession on individuals’ well-being.     

Multidimensional Targeting: Identifying Beneficiaries of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs

Conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) have two main objectives: reducing poverty and increasing the human capital of children. To reach these objectives, transfers are given to poor households conditioned on investments in their children’s education, health, and nutrition. Targeting mechanisms used by CCTs have been generally successful in identifying the income poor but have not fared as well in identifying households that under-invest in human capital. These mechanisms do not consider the multidimensional aspect of poverty, even when composite measures are used, as they do not capture each dimension-specific deprivation. This paper proposes a multidimensional targeting approach to identifying beneficiaries that explicitly takes into consideration the multiple objectives of CCTs and the multiple deprivations of the poor household. Results indicate that the proposed multidimensional targeting methodology significantly improves the selection of households with children who are most deprived in the dimensions often relevant to CCTs. In the case of Mexico’s Oportunidades, ex-ante evaluation results indicate that the multidimensional identification of beneficiaries increases the impact of transfers on school attendance compared to alternative targeting models.     

A Sociodemographic Risk Index

In this paper, we conceptualize and develop an index of sociodemographic risk that we hypothesize will be an improvement over the standard poverty measure as a measure of risk for children’s development. The poverty line is widely used in government statistics and in research but is also widely acknowledged to have multiple shortcomings. Using recent data from the National Survey of America’s Families, we develop and examine a Sociodemographic Risk Index for two potential purposes: (a) to serve as a summary indicator of children’s environments that affect their well-being, and (b) to serve as a variable that can be used to identify at-risk subgroups of children whose well-being should be examined separately in indicator reports. Based on substantial research on children’s development, we chose five variables for the index: family income, family structure, parent education, family size, and home ownership. An additive sociodemographic risk index using these variables is strongly associated with multiple measures of child well-being in both bivariate and multivariate analyses. Hence, it serves as a good marker of risk for children and therefore as an indicator that could be monitored over time, across groups, and across places, as well as a variable that could be used to identify subgroups of at-risk children whose well-being should be monitored. However, analyses do not indicate that it performs better at identifying at-risk children than the current poverty measure. Therefore, we recommend the Sociodemographic Risk Index primarily as an additional summary indicator to be monitored, rather than as a replacement for the poverty measure.     

Poverty and macroeconomic performance across space,race, and family structure

We examined the effects of macroeconomic performance and social policy on the extent and depth of poverty in America using state-level panel data from the 1981-2000 waves of the Current Population Survey. We found that a strong macroeconomy at both the state and national levels reduced both the number of families who were living in poverty and the severity of poverty. The magnitude and source of these antipoverty effects, however, were not uniform across family structures and racial groups or necessarily over time. While gains in the eradication of poverty, in general, were tempered by rising wage inequality, simulations indicated that female-headed families and families that were headed by black persons experienced substantial reductions in poverty in the 1990s largely because of the growth in median wages. An auxiliary time-series analysis suggests that the expansions in the federal Earned Income Tax Credit of the 1990s accounted for upward of 50% of the reduction in after-tax income deprivation.     

Reconciling Work, Family and Child Outcomes: What Implications for Family Support Policies?

This paper discusses the potential of family policies to reconcile the multiple objectives that they are expected to serve, over and above their role in offsetting the economic cost of children. We start by emphasizing the need to consider the multiple challenges that family policies in European Union??and/or OECD??countries have to address through a broadening of the standard economic approach to the cost of children. Policies indeed aim to reduce the ??direct?? monetary cost of raising children, but they also aim to minimise the indirect cost arising from the incidence of children on the parents?? work-life balance and on the aggregate level of employment. Moreover, motives for policy intervention such as concerns about child development, gender equity or aggregate fertility levels are not fully captured by cost measurements. We thus analyse how, and to what extent, family policies can successfully reconcile these multidimensional objectives. We offer a holistic approach, pointing out that a coherent family policy mix supporting working parents with preschool children is the only way to reconcile or limit the conflicts between work, family and child outcomes. Three main dichotomies are identified to explain cross-country differences in family policy packages: the emphasis on poverty alleviation; the supposed antagonism between fertility and female employment; and the potential conflict between this latter and child development. Ways to reconcile these objectives and to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of family policies are further discussed.     

Living conditions among the poor in four rich countries

The share of income going to the poorest 10% of Americans is much smaller than the share of income going to the poorest 10% of Canadians, Swedes, or Germans (before unification). However, comparisons across countries of the distribution of housing conditions, consumer durables, health, and visits to the doctor and dentist suggest that compared to the average person in their country, low-income Americans are no worse off than low-income residents of other countries. But these conclusions partly depend on how income is adjusted for family size. Americans whose incomes are low for a long time may suffer more material deprivation than Canadians whose incomes are low for a long time. Conclusions about economic well-being based on current income may not rank nations the same as comparisons based on deprivation in living conditions.The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, The Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation and a Small Grant from the Institute for Research on Poverty provided funding for various stages of this project. I am indebted to Christopher Jencks and two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I am also indebted to Larry Radbill who provided computer programing for the United States and Swedish data and valuable technical suggestions. Monica Ardelt provided computer programing and technical assistance for the German data. Johan Fritzel provided technical assistance for the Swedish data and David Rhodes, Karen Rolf, and Tim Veenstra provided computer programing for the Unites States data.