Home, school, and community deprivations: A multi-context approach to childhood poverty in China

Few studies of childhood poverty in China have considered social deprivations, and fewer still have considered deprivations in contexts beyond the household. In this article, the authors propose a multi-context poverty measure that includes economic and social deprivations in the family, school, and community domains. The authors compare this measure to standard money-metric measures of poverty using a 15-year longitudinal study of children from 100 villages in Northwest China. Nearly a quarter of multi-context poor children are not income poor, while almost three-fourths of the income poor are not multi-context poor. Social and community deprivations are only weakly associated with "money-metric" deprivations but are significantly linked with short and long-term welfare outcomes for children. The multi-context approach can be tailored to index household and community poverty alleviation targets.