Measuring child poverty

Today Stats NZ released background papers on some key concepts and definitions that will be used to measure child poverty in the future.

The Child Poverty Reduction Act was introduced in 2018 to help achieve a significant and sustained reduction in child poverty in New Zealand. The Act requires the Government Statistician to independently set concepts and definitions for child poverty measurement, in addition to those already prescribed in the Act.

Measuring child poverty: Concepts and definitions explains the terms we will use in calculating child poverty measures in New Zealand.

This document is accompanied by three papers that set out the reasons we made particular aspects of the decisions about the concepts and definitions.

These papers are:

•Measuring child poverty: Material hardship

•Measuring child poverty: Equivalence scale

•Measuring child poverty: Fixed-line measure.

Expanding the Household Economic Survey to obtain good measures of child poverty outlines the design of the 2018/19 survey, which collects data to measure child poverty.