Child poverty and well-being

Abstract

The European Laeken Indicators employ provide only two child breakdowns: the proportion of children living in households with incomes below 60 per cent of the national median using the modified OECD equivalence scale and the Proportion of children living in workless households. The UK also uses these indicators in the Opportunitied for All series. This paper explores the extent to which these measures represent international variation in child well-being using an index that we have developed. The conclusions are that: relative income poverty and worklessnss are poor indcators of child well-being especially for some of the new EU countries; deprivation has a stronger association with overall well-being than relative income poverty or worklessness; there are a number of other single indicators of child well- being that could be used as proxies for overall child well-being; but the EU and the UK) could easily develop its own index of child well-being.

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