Identifying childhood deprivation:How well do national indicators of poverty and social exclusion in Ireland Perform?

In the context of the significance that the life-cycle has been afforded in social policy discussion in Ireland, current national measures of poverty and social exclusion have been criticised for failing to capture such phenomena accurately in relation to particular stages of the life-course. In this paper we have taken advantage of the inclusion of a special module on childhood deprivation in EU-SILC 2009 to create reliable measures of both household basic deprivation and childhood deprivation. Overall, our analysis leads us to the conclusion that those exposed to childhood deprivation are generally a sub-set of the children captured by population indicators. Adopting a multidimensional and dynamic perspective on household resources and deprivation enables us to capture the large majority of children exposed to childhood deprivation. Restricting our attention to childhood deprivation would lead us to miss out on a significant number of children living in households experiencing basic deprivation but not exposed to childhood deprivation. It would be unwise to assume that such deprivation has no consequences for children. While there is clearly a value in supplementing existing national measures with child specific indicators, it would not appear sensible to rely solely on the latter.

Multidimensional poverty measurement in Europe:An application of the adjusted headcount approach

As awareness of the limitations of relying solely on income to measure poverty has become more widespread, attention has been increasingly focused on multi-dimensional approaches, to the point where the EU has adopted a multidimensional poverty and social exclusion target for 2020. The rationale advanced is that the computation of a multidimensional poverty index is an effective way of communicating in a political environment, and a necessary tool in order to monitor 27 different national situations. By contrast with the rather ad hoc way in which the EU 2020 poverty target has been framed and rationalised, the adjusted head count ratio applied here has a number of desirable axiomatic properties. It constitutes a significant improvement on union and intersection approaches and allows for the decomposition of multidimensional poverty in terms of dimensions of deprivation and socio-economic attributes. Since understanding poverty as multidimensional does not necessarily require constructing a multidimensional poverty index, on the basis of our analysis we provide a more general consideration of the value of developing a multidimensional index of poverty for the European Union.