Publications

This paper looks at the well-being of children in transition economies in the light of greater economic integration. The different stages of integration of the transition economies into the world economy are marked by substantial variations in trade and capital flows. International labour mobility remains limited, and unemployment has been high since the beginning of transition. Because employment is the main determinant of household income, this has had a negative effect on the well-being of children. At the national level, a high degree of variation in regional unemployment rates has emerged which is symptomatic of the lack of integration of labour markets. High regional unemployment rates are further associated with increases in non-participation, while adjustments via wages and migration have been largely absent, or insufficient. Indicators of child well-being – such as infant mortality rates – are positively correlated with unemployment rates, suggesting that public service provision is, in general, not sufficient to offset the negative effect of unemployment on child well-being. A closer look at unemployment benefit schemes reveals not only large differences between countries but also scope for broader coverage and better targeting of programmes in order to reduce the risk of families falling into poverty when parents become unemployed.

After more than a decade of coping with transition challenges in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the need for the reform of family and child welfare systems has been widely acknowledged. The mindset is changing, policies are increasingly embracing new directions, reform efforts are underway, but the lives of hundreds of thousands of poor families with children have yet to improve. Every year a large number of children are still at risk of being separated from their families and being placed in institutional care. Through 'Changing Minds, Policies and Lives', UNICEF and the World Bank have teamed up in an effort to increase the understanding of the essential challenges of the system changes, and to propose strategies to advance the reform of child and family services. The results of the joint work are the concept papers and corresponding tools that suggest how to change three important system regulators, decision making, standards and financing.

The quality of care children receive, their learning experiences and relationships, are critical in shaping their future. This is particularly true in their first years of life. Quality child protection services play an important role in enhancing learning and achievement throughout children’s lives, in providing more positive lifelong opportunities and outcomes, and in reducing poor health in adult life. The key to a high-quality child protection system is to have clear, agreed standards based on evidence of best practice and effective systems to implement and monitor them. Given the importance of promoting quality, this paper provides a framework for designing tools to specify and use standards as part of the reform of the child protection system. This is to ensure that, wherever possible, families are supported to care for their children themselves.

One of the legacies of the command economy in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been a system of social protection for vulnerable individuals which focuses on institutional care.This paper provides a framework to help countries re-orient their financing systems for social care, so that they can implement a change programme for the social care system. The ultimate objective is for countries to use more family-based and inclusive care programmes, and use institutional care as a last resort, thus supporting families to care for their vulnerable members rather than place them in residential care. Family-based and inclusive care are generally more effective in meeting social needs and are, at least on a unit cost basis, less expensive. Changing the financing system will not automatically reduce institutionalization.

The concept of social exclusion has been widely debated in Europe but its application to children has seen relatively little discussion. What the social exclusion of children can lead to is the first main theme of the paper, where among other things, the choice of reference group, the geographical dimension of exclusion, and the issue of who is responsible for any exclusion of children are considered. The second main theme is the use of the concept of exclusion in the USA, where in contrast to Europe it has achieved little penetration to date. To assess whether there is fertile ground for discussion of social exclusion as it relates to children in the US, various features of US society and institutions including the measurement of poverty, analysis of children's living standards, state versus federal responsibilities, welfare reform and the emphasis on 'personal responsibility', are all considered.

This paper investigates the impact of economic and social reforms on the well-being of children in New Zealand. These reforms were among the most sweeping in scope and scale in any industrialized democracy, but have not led to an overall improvement in the well-being of children. There has been widening inequality between ethnic and income groups which has left many Maori and Pacific children, and children from one parent and poorer families, relatively worse off. The New Zealand experience illustrates the vulnerability of children during periods of social upheaval and change and the importance of having effective mechanisms to monitor, protect and promote the interests of children.

In every single industrialized country, injury has now become the leading killer of children between the ages of 1 and 14. Taken together, traffic accidents, intentional injuries, drownings, falls, fires, poisonings and other accidents kill more than 20,000 children every year throughout the OECD. Despite these statistics, and the rising worries of parents everywhere, the likelihood of a child dying from intentional or unintentional injury is small and becoming smaller. For a child born into the developed world today, the chances of death by injury before the age of 15 are approximately 1 in 750 - less than half the level of 30 years ago. The likelihood of death from abuse or intentional harm is smaller still - less than 1 in 5,000. On the roads of the industrialized world, child deaths have been declining steadily for more than two decades.

With the transition to a market economy, a rising number of single-parent families in Russia are being placed under an intensified threat of poverty. Single Parents and Child Welfare in the New Russia provides new evidence and analysis of the effects of this phenomenon of child welfare and assesses the social policy responses of the Russian government. The authors emphasize the urgent need for detailed country-level analysis of the situation at a time of great change and increased risk.

The social and economic changes in Bulgaria since the beginning of transition naturally raise concern about their impact on child well-being. This paper investigates the changes that occurred over the last decade in three dimensions of child welfare recognised as fundamental child rights economic well-being, health and education. Then it concentrates on particularly vulnerable groups of children those born of teenage and single mothers and those living in institutions. The data show that the human cost of economic transition has been high and children have been among the most vulnerable groups of the society.

The accession of up to 13 new members in the next decade is the most important development now facing the European Union. This paper analyses measurable differences in the well-being of children between current club members, the EU Member States, and the 10 Central and Eastern European applicants seeking admission. Two themes are used as a framework for the paper. First, the importance of economic, social and cultural rights in the human rights dimension of the 'Copenhagen criteria' laid down for EU accession. Second, the need for a wider approach to measuring differences in living standards and 'economic and social cohesion' within the Union than that currently taken by the European Commission. In both cases the necessity for considering the position of children is emphasised. The empirical sections of the paper then consider in turn three dimensions of well-being of European children in Member States and the applicant countries: their economic welfare, their health, and their education.

This paper discusses the possible pathways between macroeconomic change and child welfare and develops a typology of the risks that children may face at different stages of the lifecycle. Adopting a multi-dimensional view of child well-being, trends in both economic measures of poverty, based on incomes and expenditures, and in selected capability-based indicators are then examined. The indicators selected reflect the health and survival, education and personal development of children and their social inclusion/exclusion. Not all the news is bad but the data show that the human cost of economic transition has been high and children, far from being protected from its impact, have been amongst those who have suffered the most.

This book analyses the living standards of the nearly 80 million children in the European Union, who represent over a fifth of its total population. By analysing the trends of child well-being in Europe over the last two decades, this book asks: Is the well-being of children in the EU becoming more similar across member states? Or are countries diverging while their economies converge?