Measuring child material deprivation in the EU.

The fight against child poverty and the importance of investing in children's well-being has been high on the EU political agenda for many years. In February 2013, a major step forward was taken when the European Commission published a Recommendation on 'Investing in children, breaking the cycle of disadvantage' (European Commission, 2013). The recommendation follows a series of steps taken by some EU Presidencies, the EU Social Protection Committee (SPC) and the Commission. In 2007, an EU Task-Force on Child Poverty and Child Well-Being was established by the SPC. Its report (Social Protection Committee, 2008) spelled out a number of recommendations for developing and monitoring indicators and for the use of a common framework in the analysis of child poverty and well-being. Following these guidelines, Tárki and Applica (2010) prepared a report on Child poverty and Child Well-being in the EU for the European Commission (...) This chapter provides the main results of the in-depth analysis of the 2009 EU-SILC data on child MD carried out by Guio, Gordon and Marlier (2012). A key purpose of the study by Guio and her colleagues was to identify an optimal set of children MD items among those collected in 2009 in order to recommend a child MD indicator for use by EU Member States and the European Commission. Detailed analyses, including all underlying national and EU figures can be found in this report.