The importance of poverty early in childhood

Abstract

Using a poverty line set at 60% of New Zealand’s median national income, nearly one in five New Zealand children (19%) was poor in 2011 (Figure 1, based on Perry, 2012). This poverty rate is considerably less than that of the United States and Canada, similar to that of Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany and France, and much greater that in Scandinavian countries. These rates are far from immutable; New Zealand’s child poverty rate was much higher in 2004 before social policies were enacted which focused, in part, on the country’s child poverty problem.