Child deprivation and social benefits: Europe in cross-national perspective

This article examines the ability of social benefits to soften the level of child deprivation in Europe. We construct a dedicated child deprivation indicator that allows us to better capture children's circumstances and examine the effect on them of country and sociodemographic factors jointly through multilevel models. We contribute to the scarce literature on the effects of social spending on child-specific deprivation from a cross-national perspective. We separately estimate the effect of each social benefit function on child deprivation to evaluate whether functions directly targeted at children are more effective than functions with no explicit intention of child deprivation protection. Our findings suggest that child deprivation is sensitive to household and country characteristics, the latter dimension being crucial to explain differences across European countries in the extent of child deprivation. Moreover, social benefits play a key role that remains even when controlling for country-level determinants. Finally, the most effective social benefit functions are not necessarily those targeted at children.