The Dynamics of Child Poverty in Industrialised Countries

A child poverty rate of ten percent could mean that every tenth child is always poor, or that all children are in poverty for one month in every ten. Knowing where reality lies between these extremes is vital to understanding the problem facing many countries of poverty among the young. This unique study goes beyond the standard analysis of child poverty based on poverty rates at one point in time and documents how much movement into and out of poverty by children there actually is, covering a range of industrialised countries - the USA, UK, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Hungary and Russia. Five main topics are addressed: conceptual and measurement issues associated with a dynamic view of child poverty; cross-national comparisons of child poverty rates and trends; cross-national comparisons of children's movements into and out of poverty; country-specific studies of child poverty dynamics; and the policy implications of taking a dynamic perspective.

Part I. Issues and Cross-National Evidence: 1. Beyond the snapshot: a dynamic view of child poverty Bruce Bradbury, Stephen P. Jenkins and John Micklewright; 2. Conceptual and measurement issues Bruce Bradbury, Stephen P. Jenkins and John Micklewright; 3. Child poverty across 25 countries Bruce Bradbury and Markus Jäntti; 4. The dynamics of child poverty in seven industrialised nations Bruce Bradbury, Stephen P. Jenkins and John Micklewright; Part II. Topics in Child Poverty Dynamics: 5. Income mobility and exits from poverty of American children Peter Gottschalk and Sheldon Danziger; 6. Child poverty in Germany: trends and persistence Christian Schluter; 7. Poverty among British children: chronic or transitory? Martha S. Hill and Stephen P. Jenkins; 8. Child income poverty and deprivation dynamics in Ireland Brian Nolan, Bertrand Maître and Dorothy Watson; 9. Young people leaving home: the impact on poverty in Spain Olga Cantó and Magda Mercader-Prats; 10. Are children being left behind in the transition in Hungary? Peter Galasi and Gyula Nagy; 11. Mobility and poverty dynamics among Russian children Jeni Klugman and Alexandre Kolev; Part III. Summary and Policy Conclusions: 12. Thinking about children in time J. Lawrence Aber and David T. Ellwood.

Bruce Bradbury is a Senior Research Fellow at the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. During 1998 he was a consultant at the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre. His research interests include inequality and poverty, income support and labour market policies, household equivalence scales, and intra-household allocation.
Stephen P. Jenkins is Professor of Applied Economics at the Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex and Research Professor at DIW, Berlin. His current research focuses on poverty, income and labour market dynamics. He was co-editor of The Distribution of Welfare and Household Production (Cambridge, 1998).
John Micklewright is Head of Research at the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence, and Research Fellow of CEPR, London. His current work focuses on various aspects of child well-being in industrialised and transition countries. He was the co-author of Economic Transformation in Eastern Europe and the Distribution of Income (1992) and The Welfare of Europe's Children (2000).