Abstract
This study applies UNICEF’s rights-based multiple overlap** deprivation analysis framework to a single country case study—Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Using data from the Extended Living Standards Measurement Survey 2011 for children aged 5–15, the paper analyses the incidence and intensity of multidimensional child deprivation and examines its relationship to household-based monetary poverty, drawing on differences between rural and urban areas. Seven dimensions of deprivation have been identified using the child rights framework: Nutrition, Clothing, Educational Resources, Leisure, Social Participation, Information and Housing. We find that the majority of school-age children in BiH are deprived in one or more dimensions and one in four are deprived in three or more dimensions out of seven. Children in consumption poor households are more likely to be deprived in every dimension analysed separately and in a greater number of dimensions at once. Nevertheless, the degree of overlap between poverty and multidimensional deprivation is moderate, suggesting that child deprivation cannot be eradicated solely by increasing households’ consumption capacity. Finally, the study finds no significant differences by type of area in multidimensional deprivation rates for consumption-poor children aged 5–15. In contrast, non-poor children in rural areas are substantially more likely to be deprived in three or more dimensions at once than their counterparts in urban areas. Overall, these results call for a multifaceted policy approach targeting both the demand for and supply of children’s goods and services.
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Notes
In practice, even the standard income and consumption based measures of poverty can be described as “multidimensional” as they include information about market prices of a basket of goods and services, while adjusting for varying household needs, such as size and composition (see also de Neubourg et al. 2014 for a review; Ravallion 2011).
The CRC has been signed by every state and ratified by all but one.
The global MPI (Alkire and Santos 2010) uses ten indicators related to three dimensions: health (nutrition; child mortality), education (years of schooling; school attendance), and living standard (cooking fuel; sanitation; water; electricity; floor; and assets).
For example, different indicators could be used to analyze nutritional deprivation for infants under 6 months (e.g. exclusive breastfeeding), those aged 6–24-months (e.g. appropriate feeding frequency), and older children (e.g. balanced diet: fruit and vegetables once a day).
However, multivariate analysis of correlates of multidimensional deprivation usually focus on one cut-off due to space limitations.
See the World Bank overview at http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/bosniaandherzegovina/overview (accessed on 30/12/2015).
Agency of Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republika Srpska Institute of Statistics, and Institute for Statistics of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The final sample comprises 1998 children aged 5–15.
The indicators do not need to load on the same factor because they are meant to capture different facets of a dimension (e.g. housing: the overcrowding indicator measures space available to a family, while the sanitation indicator is a proxy for the quality of housing).
Children are more likely to be excluded from the study if they live in households headed by women or higher educated persons, or households with a lower ratio of inactive to working-age members. Because these characteristics are associated with lower risk of multidimensional deprivation (Ferrone and Chzhen 2015), this suggests an over-estimation of national multidimensional child poverty rates.
The maximum number of deprivations on the vertical axis is five rather than seven because the number of deprivations has been “smoothed” using a local weighted regression of the number of deprivations (an ordinal 0-7 variable) on the consumption aggregate (a continuous variable).
Monthly per-capita expenditure.
This exploits differences in deprivation across households with different consumption levels. Based on data from just one round of the survey, this simulation does not offer evidence on the effects of changing consumption for particular households.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BHAS) and their partners, and to our colleagues of the UNICEF Country Office of BiH, in particular Sabina Zunic and Sanja Dunn. We also would like to thank the participants to the 6th ECINEQ Meeting for comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. The views expressed in this paper cannot be attributed to UNICEF; they are the responsibility of the authors alone.
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Chzhen, Y., Ferrone, L. Multidimensional Child Deprivation and Poverty Measurement: Case Study of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Soc Indic Res 131, 999–1014 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1291-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1291-8