A Book Review of the “Handbook on Child Poverty and Inequality”

Child poverty affects millions—recent estimates suggest more than 400 million children live in families earning less than $3 per day, and the number of children in poverty doubles if one considers other deprivations beyond income (for example, lack of access to education or sanitation). In the recently published Handbook of Child Poverty and Inequality, Alberto Minujin and Enrique Delamonica bring together a wide range of voices to answer key questions (and pose more of them) on this crucial topic. Here is what I learned from the book, published as a book review in the journal Population and Development Review a few days ago.

The first Sustainable Development Goal is to “End poverty in all its forms everywhere,” and its first two targets first implicitly and then explicitly include child poverty: eradicating extreme poverty for “all people” and reducing by half the proportion of “men, women, and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions.” Children are disproportionately represented among the poor: children under the age of 18 make up less than a third of the world population but more than 50 percent of those in extreme poverty (Salmeron-Gomez et al. 2023). (Chang, Evans, and Herrera 2025 also document the disproportionate representation of children among the poor in Latin America and the Caribbean.)

Child poverty is particularly pernicious because it adversely affects not only children’s current lived experience but also has ramifications throughout their lives. Children who experience monetary poverty are more likely to be malnourished (Headey and Ruel 2022), to enter school unprepared (Schady et al. 2015), and to drop out of school (Akee et al. 2010). The impacts extend across generations (Bruckner et al. 2024).

But even while the importance of the issue is clear, it raises myriad questions: What exactly do we mean by child poverty? How should we measure it? What are its impacts? How can we eliminate it? Minujin’s and Delamonica’s handbook seeks to shed light on exactly these questions, with a breathtakingly broad collection of perspectives across 29 chapters.

What do we mean by child poverty, and how should we measure it? This topic receives the lion’s share of space in the handbook for the good reason that it is deeply complicated. Different scholars and institutions define child poverty in different ways. As Gordon (Chap. 1) highlights, the first Sustainable Development Goal represents the first time all UN member states have explicitly agreed to reduce child poverty, yet “most countries do not have a national definition of child poverty.” One way to estimate and identify child poverty is to count the children in monetarily poor households. Batana, Cockburn, and Magejo (Chap. 5) provide an excellent overview of the advantages and challenges of this approach. Such a measure of monetary, household-level poverty is widely used, but it ignores the fact that resources are not shared equally within households. The authors review 14 previous studies that examine intrahousehold inequality and find that taking that inequality into account consistently results in higher measured levels of child poverty than a simple household average does.

Monetary poverty also fails to capture anything like the full range of deprivations that children experience, and while money can often be used to purchase other services (like health and education), the correlation between measures of monetary poverty and multidimensional poverty—indices that seek to capture a range of deprivations—is not as strong as one might expect. This could be because certain services are unavailable for purchase (Minujin and Delamonica, introduction of this handbook), and it could also be because children lack agency in the spending of household resources. Batana, Cockburn, and Magejo (Chap. 5) review the literature comparing monetary and multidimensional measures, and Schimanski and Azad (Chap. 22) demonstrate that even children in households with relatively high incomes often experience deprivation with regard to sanitation, shelter, or water.

Even once one is convinced of the value of a multidimensional poverty index, many questions remain. Najera, Pomati, and Nandy (Chap. 3) lay out different approaches currently in use and make a case for a “consensual approach,” in which focus groups in a specific society argue for what they believe everyone in that society should be able to do or have. Deprivation is then defined as a lack of these “socially perceived necessities” when driven by an inability to afford them (rather than a choice). They demonstrate this approach using data from approximately 60 focus groups—of mostly older adolescents and young adults—around Uganda. (Kasirye and Ahaibwe (Chap. 21) draw on related Ugandan data to examine child poverty among refugees and host communities.) The exercise was a joint effort between the Government of Uganda, UNICEF, and scholars. More than 50 percent of participants agreed that all children should have access to a wide range of services and items: medical care, three meals a day, two sets of clothing and pairs of shoes, all fees required for school, toiletries, etc. (Items like a personal cell phone for secondary school-aged children did not make the cut.) The authors then propose a statistical technique for deciding how many deprivations constitute a useful poverty line.

Because most countries lack existing focus groups or surveys of socially perceived necessities, many researchers in the book use large-scale surveys to generate indices of multidimensional child poverty. One challenge is that different indices have different indicators, weights, and cutoffs. For example, how many deprivations lead one to be “poor”? Fiala et al. (Chap. 16) lay out how different studies use one, two, or three deprivations to define poverty, which obviously leads to different numbers of people being counted as poor. Reliance on the indices alone can mean that we lack information on which deprivations have gone up or down. For example, Cid-Martinez (Chap. 15) examines associations between a multidimensional poverty index and various household characteristics (like whether the household is headed by a woman or is in a rural area—both associated with greater multidimensional poverty) but without digging into specific deprivations within the index. Yet individuals and policymakers may weigh a deprivation like severe stunting differently from having several children sleeping in the same room. Even if all of these indicators represent human rights, as Cid-Martinez argues, different households may value them differently. This points to the value of complementing the indices with decomposition into components. Multiple authors point to using multidimensional poverty indices as complements to rather than substitutes for monetary poverty measures “since they reflect different aspects of child poverty” (Batana, Cockburn, and Magejo, Chap. 5). (Minujin and Delamonica make a similar point in the introduction of this handbook.)

The handbook includes some discussion of the distinction between child poverty and other constructs. Tonon (Chap. 7) distinguishes between child poverty (based on objective measures) and quality of life (based on the “perception people have of their position in life”). Mansour and Kamal (Chap. 6) highlight that an ideal measure would capture children’s capabilities—that is, not just whether they are enrolled in school but whether they have learned skills there. The capabilities concept was originated by Amartya Sen, who is heavily cited in the handbook.

Beyond measurement, what are the impacts of child poverty? This is not the primary focus of this volume, but some chapters touch on it. Beccaria and Maurizio (Chap. 14) highlight the interlinkages between growing up in a low-income household, a high likelihood of dropping out of school, and greater difficulty in finding a first job, as well as higher turnover between jobs. They focus on literature from Latin America. Delamonica and Minujin (Chap. 29) demonstrate using panel data from Vietnam that children who were poor for longer parts of their childhoods are much more likely to be neither working nor studying as young adults. In a different vein, Cappa and Jijon (Chap. 17) examine the association between growing up in a poor household and experiencing violent discipline at home. They find a mixed record across a dozen countries, with no consistent pattern: “In most countries, all children, rich or poor, are just as likely to experience violent discipline.”

How can we eliminate child poverty? O’Donnell and Engilbertsdóttir (Chap. 13) lay out the clearest policy proposal in their appropriately named chapter “How do we end child poverty? A policy agenda,” in which they propose an agenda with three elements: (1) expand child-sensitive social protection, (2) improve access to public services (like education and health) of high quality, and (3) promote a “decent work and inclusive growth agenda.” The authors then outline details of what each element would look like.With such an expansive agenda, how countries should prioritize is a major pending question; but that may require a handbook of its own. Paruzzolo, Mukherjee, and Wright (Chap. 11) provide a deep dive into cash transfers, one program within the first element of O’Donnell and Engilbertsdóttir’s policy agenda. They summarize causal evidence showing positive impacts of cash transfers on a range of child development outcomes and complement that with a discussion of best practices in designing cash transfer programs to boost children’s welfare.

The handbook points to measurement possibilities that are yet to be operationalized systematically into standard measures. For example, Barenstein and Genijovich (Chap. 9) remind readers that the direct input of children’s voices (not just surveys representing their access to services) is an oft “overlooked resource.” Carraro and Rees (Chap. 4) use qualitative interviews with children in remote, isolated communities of Italy with limited access to services like education and health to demonstrate how children think about poor and depressed communities.

Other chapters highlight aspects of deprivation that remain largely uncaptured, such as children’s “time poverty,” when they—for example—lack access to education because they must work excessively to support their families (Dost-Gözkan and Kisbu, Chap. 27). Authors offer other deprivations that could be included in future multidimensional poverty measures, including gender-specific deprivations like access to menstrual hygiene materials (Pandolfelli, Chap. 24), disability (Kastberg, Chap. 25), and aspects of deprivation particularly pronounced in conflict zones such as psychological and emotional distress (Biggeri, Cuesta, and Ferrone, Chap. 26). The long list clarifies the challenge of comprehensively capturing multidimensional poverty and the importance of consistently clarifying whether differences in multidimensional poverty across places or over time are due to distinct definitions or changes in the underlying measures.

New tools that will be useful for poverty measurement practitioners are also on display. Fiala et al. (Chap. 16) demonstrate a tool for evaluating how fiscal policies—including different tax regimes and social service spending—affect the poorest children. Vicini et al. (Chap. 20) discuss how different sources of satellite data can be used to predict poverty even when household survey data are lacking, and they show how the method can work across sub-Saharan African countries.

There is much of value in this handbook, but the chapters are highly heterogeneous. For example, among the seven chapters in the section entitled “policies and actions,” there are more traditional reviews of evidence (Paruzzolo, Mukherjee, and Wright, Chap. 11) and policy proposals (O’Donnell and Engilbertsdóttir, Chap. 13). There are also other entries that draw less on empirical evidence: a call for “a re-imagination of the welfare state” in response to “hyper-globalisation and unfettered capitalism” (Koehler, Chap. 8); case studies of working with whole families to find solutions and hidden strengths within households rather than solely relying on external social services, a useful concept but lacking evidence within the chapter of whether the approach has been effective (Barenstein and Genijovich, Chap. 9); an encouragement to shift aspirations through “a new Perspective on life, Optimization of dimensional interplays, the pursuit of subsequent Zeniths, and Exposure to Reality,” also lacking traditional empirical evidence within the chapter (Walther, Chap. 10). Other sections have similar heterogeneity across chapters. While the editors’ commitment to a wide array of approaches is admirable, it may be challenging for some readers to put these different approaches—and their different standards of evidence—together.

While the handbook title and introduction suggest it will cover child poverty and inequality, the majority of space is dedicated to the former. Of 29 chapters, only a few have a major focus on inequality. Vandemoortele (Chap. 2) argues that inequality is “the most pressing issue of the day,” although the evidence presented is more compelling in demonstrating that inequality is important rather than that it is uniquely important relative to other pressing issues, such as, for example, child mortality. Batana, Cockburn, and Magejo (Chap. 5) focus on intrahousehold inequality and its implications for child poverty. Fiala et al. (Chap. 16) examine the impact of fiscal policies on inequality, along with their impacts on child poverty. Pandolfelli (Chap. 24) tests for gender differences in multidimensional child poverty: she finds few substantive differences on average across childhood in four countries, but does observe some differences among adolescents, with boys poorer in Haiti and girls in Guyana and Sierra Leone.

For potential readers, the print version of the book is prohibitively expensive for individuals at US$345 on the publisher’s website. The e-book from the same source is US$65. Through a partnership with the not-for-profit Electronic Information for Libraries, institutions in several dozen countries may have free access to the book.

Many thanks to Thi Le and Sarah Walters for constructive feedback on this review. Generative artificial intelligence was not used in the composition of this review.