Beyond Headcount: Measures that Reflect the Breadth and Components of Child Poverty.

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to child poverty measurement that reflects the breadth and components of child poverty. The Alkire and Foster method presented in this paper seeks to answer the question ‘who is poor’ by considering the intensity of each child’s poverty. Once children are identified as poor, the measures aggregate information on poor children’s deprivations in a way that can be broken down to see where and how children are poor. The resulting measures go beyond the headcount by taking into account the breadth, depth or severity of dimensions of child poverty. The paper illustrates one way to apply this method to child poverty measurement, using Bangladeshi data from four rounds of the Demographic Health Survey covering the period 1997–2007.

Citation

Alkire, S.; Roche, J.M. Beyond Headcount: Measures that Reflect the Breadth and Components of Child Poverty. In: Global child poverty and well-being: Measurement, concepts, policy and action. The Policy Press, (2012) 624 pp. ISBN 9781847424815

Beyond Headcount: Measures that Reflect the Breadth and Components of Child Poverty.

Updates to this page

Published 1 January 2012