Introduction

The preceding chapters summarised what there is to know about child poverty from cross-sectional data for a large number of countries, established the case for taking a dynamic perspective on the subject, and discussed the methodological issues that arise with a dynamic approach. In the second half of the book, different features of child poverty dynamics are examined on a country-by-country basis for Britain, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Russia, Spain and the United States. This chapter provides a link between the book's two parts, documenting in a common format some basic facts about the dynamics of child poverty for these seven nations.

The principal contribution of the chapter is this new longitudinal information about child poverty. Cross-national comparisons of children's movements into and out of poverty are rare, no doubt because suitable data have not been available. By contrast we do have data, though their nature guides the scope of our enquiry, as we will explain shortly. We eschew indepth analysis of mature panel surveys with fully comparable variables but available only for a very small number of countries, in favour of a more broad-brush summary of patterns for a larger number of countries at different stages of development. Nonetheless we do exploit the longer panels where we have them and we use several measures of income in order to check the robustness of our conclusions to changes in definition. The data sets, the sub-samples we analyse, and the income variables we use are all described in section 4.2.