Towards an EU measure of child deprivation

Abstract

This paper proposes a new measure of child material and social deprivation (MSD) in the European Union (EU) which includes age appropriate child-specific information available from the thematic deprivation modules included in the 2009 and 2014 waves of the “EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions” (EU-SILC). It summarises the main results of the in-depth analysis of these two datasets, identifies an optimal set of robust children MSD items and recommends a child-specific MSD indicator for use by EU countries and the European Commission in their regular social monitoring. In doing this, the paper replicates and expands on the methodological framework outlined in Guio et al. (2012, 2016), particularly by including additional advanced reliability tests.