Monitoring progress towards sustainable development: multidimensional child poverty in the European Union

The new universal Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for 'reducing at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions' by 2030. This paper proposes and evaluates a child-specific multidimensional poverty measure using data from ad hoc material deprivation modules of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). The proposed measure can be used both for national and EU-wide SDG monitoring without replacing either national or EU-wide indices of material deprivation.