Sharing Web Resources-Part 3

Making contact with other professionals from outside the U.S. continues to be a challenge.  However I am learning a long the way.  I have signed up for several discussion groups through LinkedIn.  They include:

• ·      Early Childhood Education, Child Care, and CCR&R Professionals Forum
• ·      Early Childhood Research Professionals
• ·      Early Childhood Technology Network
• ·      Early Childhood Today
• ·      Education in Developing Countries
• ·      Experienced Early Childhood Consultants
• ·      PDK (Phi Delta Kappa International

Through “Education in Developing Countries” I was able to connect with Edwin Grage who is the director of “Global Campaign for Education – USA” http://www.campaignforeducation.org/

Mr. Grage has suggested I use his name to make contact with Yvette Murphy who is the director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association for Childhood Education International http://www.acei.org/about-us/about-us.html

While browsing the ACEI website, I came across a very interesting article entitled, “Measuring Child Poverty:  New League tables of child poverty in the world’s rich countries.”  The article focuses on two significant but highly different ways in measuring poverty.  One study measures poverty through deprivation of two or more items considered “normal” for children in developed countries.  The other study measures poverty through relative income.  This is a 40 page document and every bit of it is interesting.  Below is just a snipet:

"‘Real’ poverty

It is often argued that relative poverty isn’t ‘real poverty’. Real poverty, it is said, means lacking basics - enough food to eat, adequate clothing, a dry home, an indoor toilet, hot water, and a bed to sleep in. Once you leave such basics behind and start drawing poverty lines based on statistical notions like median income, it is argued, you end up with results that fail to make intuitive sense and so fail to convince either politicians or public. Can the child poverty rate really be said to be rising, for example, at a time when the incomes of the poor are also rising? And can there really be more children in poverty

in the United Kingdom or the United States than in Hungary or Lithuania (as shown in Figure 1b)? Or are these findings just statistical artefacts produced by a definition of child poverty that is in effect based on a concern not with poverty but with inequality?

Such are the arguments that push many to reject the relative income measure and to embrace instead the direct measurement of deprivation. Does the child have three meals a day? A few books in the home? And a roof that doesn’t leak? Isn’t this a much more intuitive measure, and one that is more capable of winning public understanding and support?

Direct measures of outcomes like deprivation do have advantages over indirect or ‘input’ measures such as household income (see Box 2: The problem with incomes). But the trouble with the argument that deprivation measures ‘real poverty’, whereas relative income does not, is that the intuitively appealing idea on which it rests is that poverty should be measured in an absolute rather than a relative sense. And from here it is but a short step to the belief that the deprivation index presented in Figure 1a is an absolute measure whereas the median income method used for Figure 1b is ‘only’ a relative measure.

This is a mistake. Both are relative measures.  The deprivation index is based on the kind of possessions, services and opportunities that most people would consider normal for a child growing up in a wealthy country today. In other words, it is relative to both time and place. Twenty years ago, for example, such a list would not have included an Internet connection. Go back a little further in time and ‘having at least one meal a day with meat, chicken or fish’ would not have been regarded as normal. In fact the longer the historical view the more obvious it becomes that poverty is an essentially            relative concept. Any poverty line intended to represent a minimum acceptable standard of living in the industrialized world today implies higher standards of food, clothing, housing, water supply, sanitation, health care, education, transport and entertainment than were available to even the wealthiest households of previous eras.

The whole idea of defining child poverty in an absolute sense therefore rests on shaky ground. Unless we wish to argue that the threshold should be set at the minimum income necessary for sheer physical survival then there can in fact be no such thing as an absolute poverty line.

The real debate, therefore, is not whether poverty lines should be absolute or relative, but how and how often they should be updated to reflect changes in the living standards of society as a whole. If the decision is taken, for example, to draw an ‘absolute’ poverty line at some fixed point and to update it only for inflation, then this means that a relative poverty line is being anchored to an arbitrary point in time.As the years pass and incomes rise, such a poverty line is likely to fall further and further behind the norm for the society and to become less and less useful.This is essentially what has happened over the last half century in the United States (see Box 10:The United States: redrawing the line).

The obvious alternative is to update national poverty lines in such a way as to track the norms and living standards of the society. But how often, and by what method? Should the line be updated irregularly in an ad hoc way, subject to political pressures and the competing influences of different interest groups? Or should it be updated in a regular and systematic way in order to preserve its relationship with contemporary living standards? In which case, setting the poverty line at a percentage of each nation’s median income and updating it every year might, after all, be a strong contender.

This is why the Innocenti Report Card series, in common with both the European Union and the OECD, continues to use a child poverty line based on a percentage of median household income.

Why, then, is it necessary to complicate the picture by adding a second measure? Why introduce the Child Deprivation Index?" (Adamson, P., 2012)

References:

Adamson, P. (2012). Measuring Child Povery:  New league tables of child poverty in the world’s rich countries ( No. Report Card 10). UNICEF-Innocenti Research Centre. Retrieved from http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/660