Relative child poverty
e World Family Map also presents rates of relative poverty to measure the well-being of children in middle- and high-income countries. ese rates speak to the poverty experienced by children whose families are poor relative to other families in that country, rather than families in other countries. Speci cally, the relative poverty indicator describes the share of children who live in households with household incomes that are less than half of the country’s median income.31 e higher the relative poverty rate, the more children live in poverty in comparison with the average household with children in that country. is indicator also speaks to the income distribution within a country.
Data for this indicator, which date from between 2002 and 2013, come from household surveys, as reported by UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre’s Measuring Child Poverty report card and LIS.32
roughout the countries for which relative child poverty was measured, between 6 percent and 31 percent of children live in households with incomes that are below half of the national median income. ere is wide regional variation on this indicator, as Figure 7 depicts.