Towards optimising children’s capability and tackling relative child poverty in high-income countries: the cases of Japan, Sweden and the UK since 2000

ABSTRACT

Background

We question why child poverty still prevails even in high-income countries, such as Japan, Sweden and the United Kingdom. We address the intersection between social relations and individual experiences that should be considered when optimising children’s capability.

Objectives

The study is therefore aimed at exploring compensatory societal actions taken to optimise children’s capability among these affluent countries. In order to do so, we operationalised children’s capability by including key societal domains along with statistical indicators and variables from relevant sources.

Methods

A secondary quantitative method was adopted by drawing upon data sources from 2000 up to almost 2020 from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Bank and the United Nations Children’s Fund, with these being complemented by governmental data. Given a lack of currently available and comparable data for those three countries, four key societal domains were explored in an absolute descriptive analysis.

Results

It is obvious that child poverty prevailed over the focal 20 years in these three high-income countries. Also, the exploratory data analysis revealed a lack of sufficient supporting social services in each societal domain. This demonstrates that optimising children’s capability should not just be about subsidising economic resources, but also supporting all initiatives aimed at addressing the lack of interactions between each domain of children’s capability.

Conclusions

The study shows how essential it is to consider societal compensatory measures along with supporting the financial circumstances. We therefore argue that optimising children’s capability should not only be about subsidising economic resources, but also ensuring adequate social resources and relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s capability
• high-income countries
• relative child poverty

Responsible Editor

Jennifer Stewart Williams

Responsible Editor

Jennifer Stewart Williams

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Department of Epidemiology and Global Health, Umeå University, Sweden for the acceptance of HT as a visiting researcher. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their encouraging and constructive comments.

Author contributions

HT initiated this study, while it was conceptualised and designed by the authors jointly [HT, SHL and AI]. HT had a key role in acquiring and analysing the data, while all authors contributed to the interpretation of the findings. HT and SHL wrote the first draft of the paper, which was later developed in collaboration with AI. All authors approved the final version.

Disclosure statement

None of the authors has any potential conflict of interest related to this article.

Ethics and consent

The article has been constructed by drawing on publicly available data and thus, informed consent or ethical approval was not required.

Paper context

We assessed relative child poverty and other life circumstances of children in the three high-income countries of Japan, Sweden and the UK using publicly available data. The findings have illustrated how it is essential to consider possible compensatory societal measures along with the supporting financial circumstances. We have concluded that the focus needs to be on eradicating child poverty by redistributing economic resources, while also strengthening key compensatory measures aimed at optimising individual children’s capability.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Japanese Society for Promotion of Science grant [number JP 17K04280], with HT as the main applicant.