WUNRN
CONSIDER FOR GIRLS IN EUROPE, &
FOR MIGRANT STATUS VARIABLES
UNICEF Innocenti Working Papers 2012-02
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This document focuses on child deprivation in Europe and studies the degree to which it is experienced by children in 29 countries using a child specific deprivation scale. The paper discusses the construction of a child deprivation scale and estimates a European Child Deprivation Index for the 29 countries using 14 specific child related variables made available by the child module of the EU-SILC 2009 survey. The 29 countries are ranked according to the degree of child deprivation: the results show considerable differences between the countries.
The (non-)overlap between child deprivation and child monetary poverty is considerable but limited.
In general the results indicate where policy interventions can produce improvements.
Looking at the migrant status of the families some interesting differences are revealed:
- In the old EU member states of Austria, Belgium,
France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, almost, or well over, one fifth of the
children living in "migrant households" is deprived;
- This also the case for a number of new EU member states
(Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and
Slovakia) but for a much lower absolute number of immigrants;
- The most remarkable result is that among the group of
rich countries that manages to keep the child deprivation rates for
"non-migrant" children around or below 5 per cent (Austria, Belgium,
Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway,
Sweden and the UK) three countries stand out particularly
in "doing a much worse job" for the children in the migrant population:
Austria, Belgium and France. In Austria and Belgium the case is so extreme that
almost two-thirds of the deprived children are in migrant families (the same
holds for Luxemburg at much lower absolute levels of deprivation) (see table
7).