Profiles

The paper 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. (REVISED VERSION)

This paper presents and discusses child relative income poverty statistics for 35 economically advanced countries, representing all the members of the European Union, Australia, Canada, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United States. According to the data (mostly from 2008), Nordic countries and the Netherlands present the lowest child relative poverty levels, while Japan, the United States, most of the Southern European countries and some of the new EU member states have among the highest.

This paper tries to respond to the complex challenge of going beyond a research approach into child well-being based on averages and proposes a complementary approach to compare inequalities across economically advanced countries. More specifically, the objective of this paper is to explore and compare the extent of disparity at the bottom-end of the distribution of child well-being, focusing on the gap between the child in the middle of the distribution and those who are disadvantaged, i.e. those at the bottom of the distribution.

After two decades of transition the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States face an increasingly diverse mix of old and new policy challenges to improving child well-being and realizing children’s rights. While attempts have been made to reflect these challenges and diversities by constructing indices of child well-being, which measure and rank overall performance by individual countries, this paper proposes a simplified approach which examines five different dimensions of child well-being separately, using several indicators for each dimension which allow cross-country comparison.

This paper focuses on the transition from school to labour market for the generation of young people in CEE/CIS who experienced the most turbulent years of the transition in their formative years. Using administrative data on school enrolment, as well as data from labour force surveys, the paper tracks the main trends in education enrollments in primary, lower and upper secondary, showing that the impact of the economic difficulties of the early 1990s was greater in the poorest countries of the region, and was reflected in particular in falling enrollments for the non-compulsory levels of education.

This paper discusses some of the implications of recent demographic changes in the CEE/CIS on children of the region. The first part of the paper documents the striking changes in population size and structures which have occurred since the beginning of transition, and which have led to a substantial reduction in the child population. It is argued that they have been mainly driven by the drop in birth rates which has characterised the whole region, but which has been most dramatic in the CEE and Western CIS. Some countries in these subregions now rank among those with the lowest levels of fertility in the world, and the shrinking cohorts of children in these countries face the prospect of a growing old-age dependency burden.

This paper examines poverty in recent years among children in the countries of South Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The study analyses two dimensions of child poverty - according to household composition, and according to its urban, rural and regional dimensions. The most important findings from a policy point of view are the strong rural character of child poverty, and the relationship between child population density (at the level of the country, the sub-national region, and the household) and child poverty: where child population shares are higher, child poverty rates are also higher.