Child Consumption Poverty in South-Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States

Abstract

This paper examines poverty in recent years among children in the countries of South Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The indicator used to measure poverty is found to be robust to sensitivity testing, and to correlate well with non-income indicators of well-being among children. The absolute poverty rate among children is highest where national income is lowest, and where the density of children in the population is highest. The paper analyses two dimensions of child poverty – according to household composition, and according to its urban, rural and regional dimensions. The most important findings from a policy point of view are the strong rural character of child poverty, and the relationship between child population density (at the level of the country, the sub-national region, and the household) and child poverty: where child population shares are higher, child poverty rates are also higher. This relationship, moreover, may have strengthened over time. Child population density needs to be seen more as a trigger to redistribution.

Full text

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Session Number: Session 4B
Session Title: Child Poverty
Session Organizer(s): Miles Corak, Statistics Canada, Ottawa, Canada
Session Chair: Miles Corak, Statistics Canada, Ottawa, Canada




Paper Prepared for the 29th General Conference of
The International Association for Research in Income and Wealth

Joensuu, Finland, August 20 – 26, 2006


Child Consumption Poverty in South Eastern Europe and the
Commonwealth of Independent States


Leonardo Menchini
UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence

and

Gerry Redmond
Social Policy Research Centre, the University of New South Wales, Sydney








For additional information please contact:

Author Name(s) : Gerry Redmond
Author E-Mail(s) : g.redmond@unsw.edu.au








This paper is posted on the following websites: http://www.iariw.org

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Child Consumption Poverty in South Eastern Europe and the
Commonwealth of Independent States

Leonardo Menchini
UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence
&
Gerry Redmond
Social Policy Research Centre, the University of New South Wales, Sydney

For presentation at 29th General Conference of IARIW,
Joensuu, Finland (Parallel Session 4B),
22 August 2006


DRAFT 31 May 2006












Acknowledgements: This research was mostly carried out at the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre
under the auspicies of the MONEE Project. The authors are grateful generous funding from Development
Cooperation Ireland, for support from colleagues at IRC and at the UNICEF Regional Office for Central
and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, for valuable research assistance from
Francesca Francavilla, and for comments and advice received from Gordon Alexander, Bruce Bradbury,
Virgiinija Cruijsen, Eva Jespersen, Ala Negruta, David Parker, Fabio Sabatini, Marco Segone, Marc
Suhrcke, Luca Tiberti, and Ruslan Yemtsov. The authors are also grateful for useful comments made by
participants at workshops held at the London School of Economics on 3 March 2005, and at UNICEF IRC
in Florence on 3 June 2005, and a seminar at the Social Policy Research Centre, the University of New
South Wales, 30 May 2006. The authors remain responsible for all errors. The statements in this paper are
the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or the views of UNICEF.

Comments welcome: please contact Gerry Redmond at g.redmond@unsw.edu.au

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Child Consumption Poverty in South Eastern Europe and the
Commonwealth of Independent States

Abstract
This paper examines consumption poverty in recent years among children in 19
countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States and South Eastern Europe. The
main measure used – current household consumption tested against an absolute
poverty threshold of US $2.15 converted at Purchasing Power Parity exchange rates – is
found to be reasonably robust to sensitivity testing, and to correlate well with non-
income indicators of well-being among children. Absolute poverty among children is
highest where national income is lowest, and where the density of children in the
population is highest. Relative poverty (using the same measure of resources) on the
other hand is higher in countries with higher levels of national income.

The paper disaggregates child poverty in two ways – according to household
composition, and according to its urban, rural and regional dimensions. The most
important findings from a policy point of view are the strong rural character of child
poverty in several countries, and the relationship between child population density (at
the level of the country, the sub-national region, and the household) and child poverty:
where child population shares are higher, child poverty is also higher. This relationship,
moreover, may have strengthened over time. Child population density needs to be seen
more as a trigger to redistribution. In addition, the paper finds that in some countries,
poverty among children of single parents is mitigated by a number of factors particular
to the region, in particular migration and remittances. However, parental migration to
economically support children raises important questions about material versus other
aspects of child well-being that warrant further analysis.

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Child Consumption Poverty in South Eastern Europe and the
Commonwealth of Independent States

Introduction
This paper considers recent evidence on child poverty in the 19 post communist
countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States and South Eastern Europe. The
analysis focuses on material poverty, defined as per capita household consumption.
Children in this region have experienced considerable changes in their fortunes since the
early 1990s, and a whole generation has arguably suffered greatly from the economic
and social effects of the transition. In recent years, economies in the region appear to
have turned the corner, and average incomes are now generally increasing. Nonetheless,
this paper shows that severe problems remain, not least because recovery has been
uneven. In particular, people in rural areas have benefited rather less than those in the
cities.
The analysis aims to achieve two things in particular. First, it sets out to show that
household consumption is an appropriate measure of children’s well-being in the
region, that it is possible to measure robustly, and that absolute poverty in terms of
household consumption is correlated with other forms of deprivation. The analysis also
shows that relative measures of household consumption poverty are of value for
examining social exclusion faced by children. Second, the paper seeks to examine two
hypotheses: (a) that poverty in the region is closely related to demography, and that
high concentrations of children, particularly in individual households, but also at the
level of the region within countries, and at the level of countries themselves, are
associated with high child poverty rates; and (b) that the relationship between
household composition and child poverty is strongly influenced in some countries by
migration and remittances, which may be one explanatory factor for lower poverty rates
among children in single parent families than among children in couple families.
These issues point to the need for greater public investment in children across the region
– both in those countries where the child population continues to grow, to ensure that
poverty is not reproduced with each new generation, and also in those countries where
the child population is shrinking, sometimes at an alarming rate, to ensure that there is
sufficient public support for families to help with raising children. These issues also
raise important questions about how public redistribution policies relate to the
distribution of child populations within countries, and how some households’ responses
to poverty, although they may raise children’s living standards, also have important
non-material side effects that need to be taken into consideration. For example, the
migration of parents and their subsequent remittances may increase the material well-

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3
being of the children they leave behind. But these children may suffer in other ways as a
consequence of the absence of parents.
In carrying out this analysis, we use aggregate data and calculations from other sources,
particularly a recent study by the World Bank (2005) to paint a broad picture of child
poverty in nearly all countries across the region. We also use original analysis of
household survey microdata for five countries to describe poverty in the region in
greater depth, and to test the main hypotheses. While all countries in the region have
unique characteristics that set them apart from other countries, the five for which we
have microdata – Albania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Russia and Tajikistan do at least cover a
broad range, in terms of geography, and in terms of economic development.
We begin our analysis with an examination of the region. Section 1 provides a brief
summary of the context of child poverty – the changes that accompanied economic and
social transition, and the recent period of economic growth. Section 2 compares child
poverty across most countries in the region using a US$2.15 threshold proposed by the
World Bank (2000, 2005). Section 3 examines the sensitivity of child poverty statistics to
changes in assumptions, and examines relative poverty in a selection of countries.
Section 4 looks at household structure and child poverty, focusing in particular on large
families, and the situation of children in single parent families. Section 5 examines urban
and rural differences in child poverty, and the relationship between child poverty and
child population in regions within countries, and Section 6 concludes.
1. The heritage of communism and a decade of transition
Poverty and inequality did not suddenly appear in CIS and SEE countries at the end of
communism. Already by the mid 1980s, economic divergence was growing in the Soviet
Union. In particular, average earnings grew more rapidly in Russia than in the already
poorer Central Asian republics. Atkinson and Micklewright (1992) argue that within
republics of the Soviet Union too, the dispersion of earnings grew during the 1980s, in
many cases to above the level found in the United Kingdom in the same period. Flaherty
(1988) demonstrates a similarly widening gap between the different republics of the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from the 1970s onwards.
The fall of communism resulted in the fairly rapid creation of 15 countries out of the
Soviet Union, and five countries out of FR Yugoslavia.1 Of the 19 countries included in
this analysis, only three pre-date the end of communism. Thus the end of the communist
era heralded not only a time of economic crisis and declining living standards, but in
many cases also of armed conflict and nation-building. Often, infrastructure was

1 In May 2006, a sixth country was added to the former Yugoslavian states, with the people of Montenegro
voting in favour of independence from Serbia.

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destroyed and economic recovery delayed. In Tajikistan, for example, public
expenditure effectively collapsed during the civil war years of 1992-95. The uncertain
legitimacy of post-communist regimes, moreover, coupled with the liberalization of
markets and in some cases conflicts that were perpetuated for personal gain, contributed
to public disillusion with the institutions of the state, rendering regulation and tax
collection ineffective, with flow on effects for all areas of state activity, not least policies
to protect people against poverty, and the provision of public and social services.
Table 1 shows that in most of the 19 countries in the region, GDP per capita declined
between 1990 and 1998. The three countries that are now EU applicants - Croatia,
Bulgaria and Romania succeeded in recovering early losses in average living standards
by the end of the 1990s, as did Albania, Macedonia, Belarus and Uzbekistan. Other
countries performed less well. In particular, the countries of Central Asia started off
from a low base in 1990, and mostly experienced large declines in GDP through the
1990s. As GDP declined, so did public expenditure, including spending on social
services that children had traditionally relied on. In ten countries, the decline in overall
public expenditure as a percentage of GDP was greater than a tenth, suggesting huge
falls in real terms, once falls GDP itself are factored in. In Armenia and Georgia, declines
in real government expenditure on health care and education were precipitous.
Romania and Belarus stand out as notable exceptions where public effort in heath care
and education appears to have increased notably over the 1990s.
[Table 1 here]
Associated with declines in national income and public expenditure were growth in
unemployment, informal employment, a return to the land, and increased migration. In
Russia, 84 per cent of working age men and women were in employment in 1989. By
1999, this figure had dropped to 71 per cent.2 While formal employment declined,
employment in agriculture often rose, as Figure 1 shows. Some of the biggest increases
were in Moldova and Kyrgyzstan, where by 1999 about half of all employment was in
agriculture. The retreat to agriculture, very often subsistence in nature, was spurred in
part by land redistribution policies implemented by several governments in the region
(World Bank, 2005). While it served as a coping strategy for households to protect their
food sources during the economic crisis of the 1990s, it may also have had longer term
detrimental impacts on rural workers’ skills and earning capacities, and child well-
being, not least because capital investment and productivity among small farms was
often low, and the capacity to take advantage of economic opportunities was often
limited. When recovery came, it bypassed rural areas in many countries. In many

2 Data from the MONEE Project database, UNICEF Innocenti Resarch Centre, Florence.
www.unicef.org/irc

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countries too, migration emerged as a major response to the problems associated with
the transition. Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kazakhstan and Moldova all saw large
outflows of people, while Russia experienced a considerable inflow. As this analysis
later shows, remittances from migrants have become an important influence on
children’s living standards in some countries.
[Figure 1 here]
Declines in overall public expenditure, and in expenditure on social services, were also
accompanied by increases in income inequality and poverty. In several countries,
notably Russia, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia and Tajikistan, not only had inequality
levels surpassed OECD averages by the late 1990s, but resembled those found in several
Latin American countries (see Szekely and Hilgert, 1999). UNICEF (2001) estimates that
by the late 1990s, the majority of children, in several countries, particularly in the
Caucasus and Central Asia were living in households with incomes of less than what
the World Bank (2000) describes as a very minimum consumption level of $2.15. In these
countries too, problems of severe under-nutrition of children, and of very high rates of
infant mortality, became apparent during the 1990s. In Tajikistan in 1996, four in ten of
all children under five were small for their age (or stunted, indicating severe under-
nutrition), as were a third of children in Albania and Uzbekistan. These figures compare
with 10 per cent in Brazil and Turkey in the 1990s, and 2 per cent in the US (UNICEF,
2001). Survey data also suggest that infant mortality rates during the 1990s were at
levels seen in many poor developing countries. About 60 out of every 1,000 children
died within a year of their birth in Kazakhstan, as did 80 per 1,000 in Azerbaijan and
Tajikistan (Aleshina and Redmond, 2005).
There is a consistent pattern to trends during the Transition. Across the board –
economic decline and return to the land, income poverty, nutrition and mortality among
children, and migration – the countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia (and in many
cases Moldova) tended to experience the strongest negative effects. Within this group,
four out of five countries of Central Asia are also where the child population grew
fastest, as Table 2 shows. Most striking across the region are diverging trends in the
child population. In the Western CIS and South Eastern Europe fertility declined to
considerably below replacement levels during the 1990s. Countries such as Bulgaria and
Russia now have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and the number of
children in Bulgaria is now a third less than in 1990. In most countries of Central Asia on
the other hand, fertility, even though declining, has remained above replacement levels,
and the child population has continued to rise. In Tajikistan and Turkmenistan the child
population increased by a fifth or more between 1990 and 2003. In consequence, the
share of children in the overall population varies considerably across country groups. In
the higher income EU applicant countries of South East Europe, two in ten or less of the
total population are now aged under 18. Children make up a similar proportion of the

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population in three of the four countries of Western CIS (Moldova is the exception). In
the poor countries of Central Asia, children make up about four in ten or more of their
countries’ populations (here, Kazakhstan is an exception). Uzbekistan, one of the
poorest countries in the region, has 13 per cent of all the region’s children.
[Table 2 here]
Another constant across the region has been the role of the state in social service
provision for children. Despite the often large declines in public expenditure
experienced during the 1990s, the importance of the state as a source of welfare, both in
the form of service provision, and terms of cash transfers, should not be underestimated.
In nearly all countries, the vast majority of children are born with the assistance of
trained medical personnel. Enrolment in basic education is generally complete. And
even in the poorest countries, high percentages of children live in households that
receive public cash transfers. Moreover, a number of countries have adopted ambitious
plans to reduce poverty using frameworks proposed by international organisations,
such as Poverty Reduction Strategies, Millennium Development Goals, and
recommendations of the European Union for aspirant members. Many states are now
taking an active interest in poverty reduction. An important subtext to this analysis is
that the state matters, and that policy can make a real difference to children’s lives in the
region.
2. Consumption poverty among children in CIS and SEE
In the first analytical part of this paper, we focus on children living in households with
low levels of consumption, an indicator of resources. This is a traditional approach to
poverty measurement in both rich and poor countries, and is also the most common
used in the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia (see for example, World Bank,
2000, 2005). Bradbury (2003) defines poverty as ‘an unacceptably low standard of living’.
This definition, he argues, encompasses both a statement about empirical conditions and
a political judgement about the standard of acceptability. He states that
‘Typically, researchers define children as poor when their family or household
has a particularly low income. This is only a very indirect indicator of the
consumption level of children. Children receive goods and services purchased
from this income; they receive goods and services directly from outside the
household (for example child care, education and health services) and they
receive care from their parents.’ (Bradbury, 2003, viii).
We supplement the partial picture of children’s well-being that an income (or in our
case, consumption) poverty analysis may paint by briefly summarising the relationship
between household consumption and other indicators of child deprivation in Section 3.

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The provision of care by parents is an important background factor in our study of child
poverty, household composition and migration in Section 4.
As the large literature on the subject shows, the measurement of consumption (and
income) poverty is laden with difficulty. For example, there is no single answer as
regards how resources should be counted, where a poverty line should be drawn,
whether absolute or relative poverty measures or other inequality based approaches are
more appropriate, or how to compare households of different size and composition
(Corak, 2005). The approach taken in this analysis is to some extent pragmatic, governed
by the properties of the data (and in particular the survey microdata) available to us. We
define household consumption as expenditure on food, energy and other utilities,
clothing, education, alcohol and tobacco, transport, services such as hairdressing, and
leisure activities. We exclude from our definition direct housing costs such as rent,
expenditure on durables, and expenditure on health care.3
This definition is used by the World Bank (2005) in their study of poverty in Central and
Eastern Europe and the CIS. By adopting the same definition, we can draw directly on
their estimates of child poverty to expand the number of countries analysed, since the
World Bank analysis examines survey microdata for several countries to which we do
not have access. For the same reason, we also take the World Bank’s lead in choosing a
per capita equivalence scale to compare consumption across households of different
size, and in using their threshold of US$2.15, converted from local currency to US
dollars using Purchasing Power Parity exchange rates which are based on OECD
estimates for the year 2000 (see OECD, 2003). The World Bank argues that this threshold
is a suitable basic subsistence measure for the Europe and Central Asia region:
“While in many parts of the world the one-dollar-a-day line is used to measure
absolute deprivation, the two-dollar-a-day line is more appropriate for the
Europe and Central Asia region because its very cold climate necessitates
additional expenditures on heat, winter clothing and food. ” (World Bank, 2000,
p.34)
The World Bank states moreover that this line is roughly equal to the lowest national
absolute poverty lines that are used in some of the poorer countries in the region. As
with the dollar a day measure, used to track poverty in developing countries for the
Millennium Development Goals, the two dollar measure (as the World Bank commonly
calls it) is simple and telegraphic, and tells us something important about the relative

3 Analysis by the authors for a limited number of countries shows that the exclusion of these items does
not greatly impact on poverty estimates. However, the treatment of housing costs does perhaps
need further consideration – in particular the valuation of imputed consumption of owner
occupied housing, and its treatment in terms of poverty.

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well-being of people (and children) across countries. For these reasons, Deaton (2003)
and Ravallion (2002) defend it. On the other hand, Reddy and Pogge (2002), and
Kakwani (2004) argue that this measure undercounts the poor, and that the purchasing
power parities used to construct formally equivalent poverty lines are seriously flawed.
They argue instead in favour of nationally defined poverty lines, which however we do
not use in this analysis for reasons discussed in Section 3 below.
Figure 2 presents data on overall and child consumption poverty rates according to the
$2.15 measure in 14 countries in the region around 2002. Here children are defined as
under 16 years of age. Across the 14 countries, about one in four is poor according to
this definition. There are three distinct country groups in the figure. The first group,
with the lowest child poverty rates in the region, ranging from 5 to 12 per cent, includes
countries of the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia-Herzegovina, FYR Macedonia, and Serbia
and Montenegro), plus Bulgaria and Russia. These countries are the richest in the
region. They also have low fertility rates (rates in Bulgaria are among the lowest in the
world) and the share of children in their populations is generally low (less than a
quarter of the total). The next group comprises Romania, Kazakhstan and Albania, with
child poverty in the range 21 to 30 per cent. In Albania and Kazakhstan, children
comprise a third of the total population, but in Romania, they comprise little more than
a fifth. Given this fact, coupled with its relatively high average income and its status as
an EU applicant country (Bulgaria and Romania are currently due to join the EU on 1
January 2007), the child poverty rate in Romania seems especially high, perhaps due in
part to the very high poverty rate experienced by Roma children, as well as the very
high levels of rural poverty.4 Among the remaining countries - Uzbekistan, Moldova,
Georgia, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan - more than half of all children are poor. In
Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, close to four in five children live in households with less
than $2.15 consumption per person per day. In Tajikistan, children comprise half the
total population, the biggest share among all the countries in the region.
[Figure 2 here]
Five of the 19 countries covered by this analysis – Azerbaijan Belarus, Croatia,
Turkmenistan and Ukraine – are not included in Figure 2. Child poverty statistics for
these five countries are either not available in comparable form, or appear to the authors
to be unreliable. In particular, there are almost no useful statistics on poverty available
for Turkmenistan, and the country is not well covered in this analysis. In general,

4 Zamfir et al (2005) show that while Roma children represent 5.3 per cent of all children, they account for
17 per cent of poor children, and 26 per cent of severely poor children (both poverty and severe
poverty defined according to national criteria). Figure 4 in this paper also shows that child
poverty in Bulgaria has a strong ethnic dimension.

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however, Belarus and Croatia are likely to tend towards the left of Figure 2, while
Azerbaijan is likely to tend more towards the right, with Ukraine and Turkmenistan
more in the middle.
The statistics on figure 2 suggest a serious and ongoing problem of child poverty in the
region, particularly considering the very low threshold used. This problem is clearly
most serious in Moldova and the countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Figure 3
nonetheless shows that in almost every country, the proportion of children in living in
households with consumption of less than $2.15 per capita has declined since the late
1990s, having peaked in most countries for which there are data in about 1998 or 1999, in
the aftermath of the Russian financial crisis. (There are few data available for any
country in the region that allow robust comparison of child poverty between the early
and late 1990s, during which period poverty almost certainly increased.) Particularly
notable is the decline in Tajikistan from 92 to 76 per cent of children between 1999 and
2003, during a period of continued population growth among children. In Moldova the
proportion of children in poverty fell from 85 to 53 per cent over the same period, but
this was probably helped by a continuing decline in the child population. The child
poverty rate in Romania also fell considerably over the late 1990s and into the new
century, but was nonetheless no lower in 2003 than it had been in 1998, even though the
child population had declined by almost a fifth in this period. In both Georgia and
Uzbekistan, the child poverty rate was on a worryingly upwards trend in 2003.
[Figure 3 here]
Table 3 shows relative risks that people in different age groups in the population will
fall below the $2.15 poverty line, where a risk of 1 indicates that an age group is no more
or less likely than the average to fall into poverty. In every country, poverty risks are
greatest for young children, gradually decreasing with age. In a few cases (Georgia,
Moldova, Russia) the poverty risk increases again for the elderly, while in other
countries, it continues to decline. The gradient of increase in poverty risk with
decreasing age is steepest in Russia and Bulgaria where relatively few people fall below
the $2.15 threshold, but flatter in the case of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, where most
people are poor. The relatively higher poverty risk for younger children in part reflects
life cycle issues – young children are likely to have younger parents who have not yet
reached their earnings peaks. But they also reflect the poor level of financial and other
support given by states to young children in the region (see Stewart and Huerta, 2005).
This lack of support is evident in both countries where the child population is
increasing, and in countries where it is declining.
[Table 3 here]

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3. Alternative poverty measures
How robust are the poverty estimates presented in Section 2 above? As emphasized in
Section 1, any estimate of poverty is the result of a series of value-based technical
decisions and assumptions. Annex I shows some analyses of sensitivity for the poverty
statistics for the five countries (Albania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Russia and Tajikistan) for
which we have microdata. Findings can be briefly summarized as follows:
• Varying the $2.15 poverty line by plus or minus ten per cent does not greatly alter
the proportions of children in poverty, or the relative rankings between countries,
suggesting that there is little “bunching” of children around this poverty line.
Choosing another absolute poverty line of $4.30 PPP per capita does not alter the
ranking of countries in terms of poverty rates.
• In four out of the five countries, varying the equivalence scale does not change
the relative positions of children and the elderly– some very strong assumptions
about economies of scale would need to be made before the proportion of elderly
people falling below the $2.15 threshold exceeded the proportion of children
below the threshold. In Moldova, however, a small change in the equivalence
scale does change relativities between children and elderly quite significantly. In
the case of Bulgaria, our conclusions are somewhat at variance with those of
Lanjouw et al (2004), who find that poverty relativities among children and the
elderly in that country are highly sensitive to the choice of equivalence scale.
However, the poverty lines used in both analyses are different, and the data used
by Lanjouw et al for Bulgaria are for 1995.
• In all five countries examined, the average gap between the consumption of
households with children and the $2.15 threshold is high, ranging from about a
fifth of the $2.15 poverty threshold in Albania, to two fifths (or over US$0.80 in
PPPs) in Tajikistan. This confirms the finding noted above that children are not
bunched near the poverty line, and suggests that most children who are poor
would need quite a boost to their consumption in order to cross the $2.15
threshold. This is in line with Stewart and Huerta’s (2005) finding that social
security payments across the region, whether targeted at those with the lowest
incomes or not, tend to have little impact in terms of lifting children out of
poverty.
• For most available indicators, there is a reasonably strong relationship at the level
of the individual child between poverty among children and deprivation in terms
of outcomes, such as overcrowded housing, access to water and sanitation, and
enrolment at school (see Annex 1 Tables A1.3 and A1.4). There is also a strong
positive relationship at the regional level in several countries between child
poverty rates and infant mortality rates (see the example for Russia on Annex 1

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Figure 1.1). The strong correlation between household consumption and more
direct outcome measures tends to underline the usefulness of the former as an
indicator of children’s well-being. However, household consumption by no
means captures all aspects of children’s well-being. Baschieri and Falkingham
(2006) show that in the case of Albania, the relationship between under-nutrition
and poverty among young children is weak, and also that different indicators can
be widely dispersed across populations of children (and even populations of poor
children), so that those who miss out on school are not always the same as those
who live in poor housing conditions, or who lack easy access to clean drinking
water. Household consumption can reveal a lot about children’s well-being. But it
does not reveal the whole story.
Relative poverty among children was also estimated for the five countries for which we
have access to microdata, and the results are worth considering at greater length,
because they tell a different story to that told by the absolute poverty statistics. While it
is possible to argue that relative poverty can lose much of its meaning where even the
median is below a very low absolute threshold such as the $2.15 poverty line (this is the
case in some countries in the region, for example Tajikistan), there are two reasons why
we believe it is nonetheless important to monitor relative child poverty, even in the
poorest countries. First, while economic growth, as shown above, may be associated
with strong declines in absolute poverty rates, it may also be accompanied by an
increase in relative poverty, if inequality in the bottom half of the income distribution
rises. Relative poverty measures can be used as a check on the fairness of the
distribution of economic growth, particularly where such growth has been rapid, as has
happened in the region since 1998. We do not have data to examine trends in relative
child poverty in the region. However, Zamfir et al (2005) suggest that in the case of
Romania, relative poverty among children did not decline at all between 2000 and 2004,
in spite of a substantial fall in absolute poverty over this period.
The second reason for monitoring relative child poverty even in poorer countries is
because research shows that children themselves are often aware of how their living
standards may differ from those of their peers, and can sometimes experience exclusion
from the activities that their peers engage in because of their relative poverty
(Micklewright, 2002; Van der Hoek, 2005). Arguably, children (and their parents) are
more likely to compare themselves, not with ‘ the average child’, but with children in
their age group.5 If relative poverty rates among a particular age group of children are

5 Children may also compare themselves just with children in their immediate community, for example,
the school that they attend. However, they (or their parents) may also be aware of their
community’s standing in relation to other communities. Among smaller countries such as
Bulgaria and Moldova, it is plausible that children and their parents develop a national
perspective in assessing their relative well-being. However, in large countries such as Russia, a

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notably lower than relative poverty rates among all children (even where absolute
poverty overall may be high), this may suggest a lesser degree of social exclusion than
the overall poverty rate implies. Moreover, greater equality in living standards among
children of similar age suggests perhaps greater equality in opportunities for growth
and development.
Table 4 shows relative poverty statistics all children, and only children aged 0-6. In each
case, the poverty threshold is 60 per cent of median household consumption with a per
capita equivalence scale. However, the population from which the median is calculated
changes: from all persons (the first and third rows of poverty statistics in the table), to all
children (the second and fourth rows), and just children aged 0-6 (the fifth row). In
Albania, Moldova and Tajikistan, all the relative poverty lines are below the $2.15 PPP
threshold, while in Bulgaria and Russia they are all above. When measured against the
‘all persons’ poverty line, relative poverty among all children and among young
children is highest in Bulgaria, Moldova and Russia, and somewhat lower in Albania
and Tajikistan. When measured against the ‘all children’ and the ‘children aged 0-6’
thresholds, however, children’s poverty is clearly highest in Bulgaria and lowest in
Albania, suggesting perhaps a greater degree of social exclusion among children in the
former country.
[Table 4 here]
It is also worth comparing the different poverty statistics within each country for the 0-6
age group. As the population from which the poverty line is calculated changes from ‘all
persons’, to ‘all children’ to ‘children aged 0-6’, the relative poverty rate falls furthest in
Albania (from 21 to 14 per cent) and Moldova (from 31 to 17 per cent), and to a lesser
extent in Russia and Tajikistan (from 28 to 21 per cent, and from 21 to 16 per cent,
respectively). This suggests that in these countries there is rather more homogeneity in
terms of living standards among young children (or at least, those in the poorer half of
the population) than among children overall. This may be because young children’s
parents are likely to be at a similar stage in their earnings and career cycles. If young
children (or their parents) compare their material well-being with other young children
of their age, then they may feel less relatively deprived in these countries than if they
compare their well-being with all children, or all people. Moreover, if opportunities for
children’s intellectual and physical development are closely related to their current
living standards, then such opportunities are likely to be more equal in these countries
than the overall relative poverty statistics suggest.

national perspective may be lacking, and it is not clear whether children in Irkutsk would
compare themselves with children in St Petersburg, or just with other children in Siberia.

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In Bulgaria, on the other hand, the poverty rate among children aged 0-6 shifts relatively
little (from 33 to 27 per cent) as the population from which the poverty threshold is
calculated changes. This suggests that the degree of heterogeneity in living standards
among young children in Bulgaria is almost the same as among all children: whether
children or their parents compare themselves with the average person, or with the
average child, or just with children in their age group, they are almost equally likely to
feel socially excluded. This may be due to the structure of poverty in Bulgaria, which is
particularly concentrated in two ethnic minority groups – Roma and Turks. Figure 4
shows that although these two groups make up respectively 18 and 10 per cent of all
children in the country, with ethnic Bulgarians comprising nearly all of the remaining 72
per cent, they are heavily concentrated in the lowest two or three deciles of the
distribution of household consumption. There may be less of a ‘life cycle’ element to
poverty in Bulgaria. Rather, the differences between ethnic Bulgarian children on the
one hand, and Roma and Turk children on the other, are likely to be reflected not only in
higher levels of social exclusion now for the latter, but also in correspondingly unequal
opportunities for growth and development in the future.
[Figure 4 here]
While this section and Section 2 above have mostly compared poverty as measured by
household consumption across the region at the national level, Sections 4 and 5 will
disaggregate these data according to family composition, and according to geography
(urban/rural and regions within countries). These two disaggregations are chosen
because they reveal important and policy relevant findings on children’s well-being
across the region. For the most part, the analysis in the next two sections focuses on only
those five countries for which we have survey microdata. Where possible, we
supplement this with information for other countries.
4. Poverty and household composition
There is considerable evidence to suggest that in rich countries, child poverty is strongly
associated with household structure. In particular, it is heavily concentrated among
children living in large households, and in single parent households (UNICEF, 2000).
The analysis in this section shows that poverty among children in large households is
also severe in CIS and SEE countries, although the picture of poverty among children in
single parent households is somewhat more varied.
Table 5 presents detailed information on household composition and poverty for two
countries - Russia and Tajikistan. The two countries differ greatly, not only in terms of
child share in the total population (see Table 2), but also in terms of the distribution of
children across households. Most notable are the large number of adults who live in
households without any children in Russia (almost half of the population, or two thirds
of households), compared with the much smaller proportion in Tajikistan (less than one