The Analysis Of Multidimensional Children Poverty Of Punjab, Pakistan

Abstract

Poverty is a global issue hence children are living in dire poverty conditions than adults. It has vulnerable effects on children’s nourishment. The sustainable development goals (SDGs) measure child poverty by Multidimensional technique instead of the income method. Children living in poverty are facing financial limitations, which impede to their access to education and health facilities, acquiring housing, sufficient nutrition food, and safe drinking water.  The fundamental concept of this study is to measure and estimate the child poverty of two age groups. For this purpose, developed the child age specific index, deprivation cutoff and assign the weight to each indicator. The significant part of the research is to calculate the child MPI poverty especially for Punjab.  The distinctive part of the current MPI methodology is that the indicators are different from national MPI and all indicators are related to child-specific and have geographical aspects of Punjab. The data had been acquired from the current MICS 2018 that consist of 37052 for middle age children and 24028 for young age children. The first part of methodology is based on the calculation of children MPI poverty by applying Alkaire Foster methodology. The second part is based on logistic regression to calculate the marginal effect of each indicator. Young children are more in the trap of MPI poverty (0.21) than middle age group children (0.16). The causes of the deprivation of young children are the lack of daily calorie intake, childhood learning development, safe and maintained shelter, and health functioning problems. The concept of marginal effect is more accurate for policy making purpose and provides more informative statistics than Odds ratios. The marginal effect shows that child poverty of both age brackets is a corrosive situation for vulnerability of society with many harsh consequences on children’s growth, children’s educational development, children’s nourishment due to poor health and living standard indicators. The conclusion of the study provides a comprehensive outline how our policy makers can reduce children’s deprivation and why it is important to protect children from the minor and major vulnerabilities.