Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
Indicators of child well being grew exponentially in the last four decades in both industrialized and developing countries. While efforts continue to develop comparative indicators of child well-being across countries, far less attention is focused on generating organized and comparative data on policies affecting children in developing countries and related outcome measures. This paper summarizes the history and trends in measuring child well-being and policies and examines the availability of data to create a global database on child policies and policy outcomes. Numerous efforts are currently underway to develop composite indicators of child well-being at all geographic levels but these indicators are unlikely to be tied to existing and emerging child policies. A paradigm for categorizing child policies and outcome measures across countries is offered. The lack of comparative data on policies affecting children in developing countries and outcomes is seen as an obstacle to furthering the development of policies that promote child well-being.
This chapter presents a new approach to child poverty measurement that reflects the breadth and components of child poverty. The Alkire and Foster method 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 chapter illustrates one way to apply this method to child poverty measurement, using Bangladeshi data from four rounds of the Demographic Health Survey (1997–2007). We argue that child poverty should not be assessed only according to the incidence of poverty but also by the intensity of deprivations that batter poor children’s lives at the same time.
This chapter discusses the extent and nature of child poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia at the end of the twentieth century. In doing so, it presents data on the number and distribution of children living in poverty and deprivation in the year 2000, with data disaggregated for urban and rural areas, and where relevant, by gender. While knowing the pattern of deprivation and poverty at a point in time is useful it is also important to know if conditions for children are improving or getting worse. Thus, the chapter shows what changes occurred in these regions, between 1995 and 2000. Policy implications are discussed.
Measurements of poverty in terms of the principles of access to, and exercise of, a specific number of rights in areas like nutrition, safe drinking water, sanitation, housing, education and information show that 32 million children in Latin America were living in extreme poverty in 2007, and that the overall number of persons in poverty stood at almost 81 million. The chapter presents data on child poverty in Latin America, but explicitly measures it with a rights approach. This means considering children to be poor when at least one of their rights is unmet, or when they suffer at least one basic deprivation. Nonetheless, in child poverty, multiple deprivations occur simultaneously, reinforcing each other andundermining children’s and adolescents’ development. The chapter reports findings from a study which measured child poverty using two traditional methodologies: (i) direct methods (unmet basic needs), which were adapted to measure several levels of deprivation among children, based on the proposal by the University of Bristol and the London School of Economics; and (ii) indirect methods, represented by the measurement of absolute poverty according to per capita household income. It also presents data sources, methodology and aggregation indexes (appendix).
This chapter examines the extent to which a human rights approach offers a framework to increase accountability for the policies that perpetuate child impoverishment. In doing so, it considers some of the practical limitations to this framework with specific reference to the issues of ‘justiciability’ and ‘progressive realisation’. Finally, it explores how social scientists may utilise human rights frameworks in poverty research, as well as the methodological issues that arise from this approach.
Despite having per capita incomes well in excess of most other countries, the US also has some of the highest rates of child poverty in the OECD and compares poorly to most high-income countries on other critical indicators of child well-being. In this chapter, the authors make the case for the development and use of a ‘Tots Index’ for the United States, rooted in the human development approach, which would include key indicators of child well-being appropriate for use in an affluent country. The authors show why an index focusing on children under the age of five in the US is needed and evaluate their own American Human Development Index and other existing measures to determine if these are suitable proxies for measuring child well-being. Finding that all existing metrics have liabilities in this regard, the authors lay out a framework for a new multidimensional indicator for this purpose and discuss the types of indicators it should include.
The chapter brings together the key lessons and themes of the book. Future studies of child poverty need to reflect international definitions which set out its multidimensional nature. Effective policies for alleviating child poverty in developing countries have long been known as demonstrated by work done during earlier economic crises. The principles enshrined in Townsend and Gordon’s 2002 Manifesto of International Action to Defeat Poverty are still relevant to today’s anti-poverty strategies.
This chapter provides an overview of Young Lives, a longitudinal study of childhood poverty following the lives of 12,000 children in 4 developing countries (Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam) over 15 years. The authors outline the study’s conceptual and analytical framework and report on some early findings concerning trends in child welfare and the dynamics of child poverty, in particular looking at how poverty is transmitted across generations. Based on data collected when the children were aged 5 and 12, they conclude that economic growth itself will not solve the problems associated with poverty in childhood, and in some instances can accentuate inequalities. They also conclude that the experience of deprivations in childhood cast a very long shadow for children as they grow and develop, and that properly designed social policies can have a protective effect against economic shocks (such as the global financial crisis).
This chapter describes an approach to defining child poverty in South Africa using a socially perceived necessities method which was conceived in Britain in the mid 1980s. This approach, when applied to the measurement of child poverty, involves asking a representative sample of the (usually adult) population to state which of a list of items is essential for children to have an acceptable standard of living. It is then possible to measure in a survey how many children do not have the items defined as essential and can therefore be considered poor. The socially perceived necessities approach is described and a justification for the involvement of children, alongside adults, in defining poverty is put forward. The methodology used to apply this approach in South Africa is detailed. The definition derived from a survey module asking adults for their views on an acceptable standard of living is presented and compared to the views of children derived from focus group work. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some of the methodological issues that arise when applying this approach, including how to reconcile the adult and child definitions and the extent to which children’s own circumstances impact on their definition of necessities for all children.
Chapter 9 describes the indicators and the analytical framework used to analyse child poverty in the European Union. Comparative analysis is used to identify the main drivers of monetary poverty among families with children in the rich EU countries. It reveals that different factors prevail across countries of the Europe Union depending on how well parents are integrated in the labour market, and how much support is available to families with children. The indicators used are those that have been developed and agreed upon in support of the EU policy coordination process in the field of social inclusion policy. The chapter discussed the potential value added of politically agreed indicators and comparative analytical frameworks for evidenced based policy making.
