Child Poverty in China-A Multidimensional Deprivation Approach

This paper applies a human-rights based deprivation approach to measure child poverty in China based on secondary data analysis. It discusses the following questions: How to select available deprivation indicators to measure child poverty in China? Are the available deprivation indicators valid, reliable and additive? How did child poverty change between1989 and 2009 and how did it vary by region? The main objective is to use existing longitudinal and cross sectional survey data to build scientific deprivation indicators to measure the living standards of children and produce estimates of child poverty in China across time and space. All waves from 1989 to 2009 of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) data will be utilized. In order to choose a set of deprivation indicators, several statistical tests for the validity, reliability and additivity of the deprivation items are developed. Validity tests aim to check whether income has a significant association with deprivation indicators; A Classical Test Theory (CTT) model is used to determine if the list of deprivation items form a reliable scale/index.; The final test shows whether the deprivation indicators are additive or not. This methodology builds on the work of Gordon (2000, 2006) and final list of valid, reliable and additive deprivation indicators is applied to explore child poverty across time and space. The findings indicate that children’s living standards in China have improved over time but that significant regional disparities remain.