Child Poverty Monitor 2013

This Technical Report marks a new step in monitoring child poverty and social health indicators in New Zealand. It began with a partnership being established between the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, the University of Otago’s New Zealand Child and Youth Epidemiology Service (NZCYES) and the J R McKenzie Trust. This partnership saw a gap in publicly-available child poverty measures, and is addressing this gap by compiling, publishing and disseminating annual measurements on child poverty in New Zealand. This Report provides data and technical information on child poverty measures, economic indicators, and child health measures. It builds on the information in previous Children’s Social Health Monitor updates, so that the same data is still compiled and reported consistently. This Technical Report, however, adds new dimensions around child poverty measures. The child poverty measures included align closely to the recommendation of the EAG to have a suite of measures to capture different aspects of child poverty. We have included measures on income poverty, material hardship, severity and persistence of child poverty. For these elements, we rely heavily on data available in the Ministry of Social Development report Household Incomes in New Zealand: Trends in Indicators of Inequality and Hardship 1982 to 2012