This is the second year of the Child Poverty Monitor and this Technical Report provides data on a set of indicators that assess aspects of child poverty in New Zealand and their implications for child wellbeing. This work is supported by the partnership between the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, the University of Otago’s New Zealand Child and Youth Epidemiology Service (NZCYES) and the J R McKenzie Trust. The increased concern about child poverty within society underlines the importance of providing and publishing this compilation of publicly available measures. Only by having the essential measures on child poverty in New Zealand compiled, published and disseminated annually can we tell how well we are progressing in effectively reducing child poverty in our nation.
The indicators and measures used in this report arose partly from the recommendation of the Children’s Commissioner’s Expert Advisory Group (EAG) on Solutions to Child Poverty. In 2012 the EAG called for a suite of measures to capture different aspects of child poverty and report on these annually. The Child Poverty Monitor also owes its genesis to the Children’s Social Health Monitor (CSHM) which had been produced by the NZCYES since 2009 to measure key indicators for children’s health and wellbeing.