Measuring Child Poverty in Argentina

The most commonly used poverty measures based on the poverty line identify children in poverty as those living in households whose income or expenditure is insufficient to cover the cost of a minimum consumption bundle. However, these measures do not specifically identify child poverty. Traditional poverty measures also fail to account for children's needs, which may differ from those of adults in the same households. Moreover, children's voices are poorly represented even in measures that attempt to reflect people's views on poverty and needs.

In recent decades in Argentina, the measurement of monetary poverty has dominated, through the use of a measure that, although recognising multiple dimensions of deprivation, summarises them in a unidimensional indicator. In 2019, the City of Buenos Aires developed a multidimensional poverty measure that incorporates the consensual approach to identify the relevant dimensions and thresholds to consider a household in poverty, including several indicators of child poverty. The survey was repeated in 2021, when the health crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic had not yet receded.

The aims of this presentation are twofold. Firstly, to present the profile of multidimensionally poor families and children in order to identify the relationship between deprivation in specific dimensions and the perception of the need to access certain goods, services, and activities; the different profiles of poor households and children depending on whether the multidimensional or monetary poverty measures are used for identification; and the changes in both the magnitude and composition of poor children between 2019 and 2021.

Secondly, it explores the opportunities that the consensual approach presents for incorporating children’s views and measuring multidimensional child poverty, with attention to both methodological and legal challenges.