Why study child poverty dynamics?

If one in ten children is currently poor (a child poverty rate of 10 per cent), it could mean that every tenth child is in poverty all the time or, at the other extreme, it could mean that all children are poor for one month in every ten. This book sheds light on where the reality lies between these extremes. For a range of industrialised countries it documents how much movement into and out of poverty by children there actually is. It is therefore a book about poverty among children and about the dynamic aspects of that poverty – how individual children move into and out of being poor.

The focus on the poverty of children as opposed to any other group in the population needs little justification. Children represent a country's future, an obvious reason for societal concern with child well-being. There are innate feelings of protection towards the young and assumptions of their blamelessness for the situation in which they find themselves. Children are unable to take full responsibility for their circumstances and are dependent on others to look after and raise them. Their vulnerability provides a powerful moral imperative in favour of collective action in general to help them, and a welfare state in particular (see, for example, Goodin 1988). To implement this requires prior knowledge about the nature of child poverty and its consequences, plus knowledge of what the causes are.