A report aimed at significantly developing the evidence base on ethnicity and child poverty has been published by the Department for Work and Pensions. Ethnicity and child poverty, produced by ISER’s Lucinda Platt, draws on a range of data sources to present a variety of poverty measures – including income poverty, poverty persistence, material deprivation, and worklessness – for children and families from different ethnic groups.
The report explores why child poverty rates observed for most ethnic minority groups are higher than the national average and uses regression analysis techniques to examine whether this is due to increased levels of poverty risk factors amongst families from these groups, or whether it requires further explanation.
Using data from the Family Resources Survey and Households Below Average Income dataset, the Millennium Cohort Study, the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study, and the Labour Force Survey, the reports key findings are:
- On most of the measures presented in the report – which include income poverty, poverty persistence, material deprivation, and worklessness – children from all ethnic minority groups are disadvantaged compared to white British children. Levels of poverty are particularly high for Pakistani and Bangladeshi children.
- These differences are partly explained by risk factors: with some exceptions, children from ethnic minority groups are more likely than white British children to live in families which experience poverty risk factors such as lone parenthood, large numbers of children, worklessness or a deprived local area. Indian families have generally lower than average risk factors, despite having higher poverty rates than White British
families. - However, the differences in risk factors are not large enough to fully explain the differences in poverty presented: even when family risk factors are controlled for, some children from ethnic minority groups are disadvantaged compared to the white majority – the author refers to this unexplained disadvantage as an ‘ethnic poverty penalty’.
The report is published as part of the DWP research report series (report number 576). A short summary of the report can also be found
on the DWP website.