Monitoring Child Well-being in the European Union: Measuring cumulative deprivation

This paper describes and empirically tests a number of candidate measures of cumulative deprivation to monitor child well-being in the EU.The authors posit that the ideal measure should be sensitive to changes in the depth of cumulative deprivation and, given its broad use in the policy community, has an intuitive interpretation. Using the 2007 wave of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) data, the authors constructed several measures of cumulative deprivation from a set of 13 deprivation indicators for Germany, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.