A multidimensional child poverty index in China

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper analyses the multidimensional child poverty status and its dynamic changes in China from 1989 to 2009 using the China Health and Nutrition survey data. Built on the Alkire–Foster methodology, the adjusted child poverty headcount ratio is calculated which measures not only the traditional headcount ratio of child poverty but also the average deprivation intensity among poor children. The overall poverty rates declined over years from 1989 to 2009 in national wide and among provinces, where the key driver was the reduction of the poverty headcount ratio. With the property of decomposition for the adjusted headcount ratio, this study also examines the provincial and regional contribution to the national poverty reduction. Provinces in the middle region of China received the biggest reduction of child poverty rate, and the regional gap of child poverty has been narrowed down, but more effort of poverty reduction should be made to the poorest provinces and rural areas. Child poverty is an under researched topic in China (Qi & Wu, 2014; Qi &Tang, 2015), and the existing few studies dominantly defined and measured child poverty using the income indicator only. Begum et al. (2012), for example, estimated the child poverty rate in China using three waves of the China Household Income Project (CHIP survey) in 1988, 1995 and 2002. Child poverty in this study was defined as those living in households with disposable income lower than the one-dollar a day poverty line. Similarly, the World Bank (2009) applied its dollar-a-day poverty line, two-dollar a day and three-dollar a day poverty thresholds to estimate the scale of child poverty in urban China in 2003. However, the uni-dimensional income-based measure has many drawbacks in the measurement of child poverty. It is not known how children living below income poverty lines experience poverty or whether their basic rights as ratified in UNCRC (1989) have been fulfilled or not. Child poverty is a multidimensional concept that has many manifestations. Child poverty means not only insufficient household resources but also material and social deprivation — hunger, malnutrition and the lack of access to water, sanitation, education, health, shelter, and information (Gordon et al., 2003a,b). Consequently, this paper will contribute to filling the existing knowledge gap in academic research by measuring the changes in the extent and nature of multidimensional child poverty in China from 1989 to 2009 using …