Multidimensional Child Poverty from the Child Rights-Based Approach: A Latent Class Analysis to Estimating Child Poverty Groups in Mexico

The study aims at estimating multidimensional poverty groups among children under five years of age in Mexico. Our analysis is based upon the framework on the Rights of the Child. For this purpose, we focus on identifying different types of child deprivation and the various risk factors that determine child poverty in Mexico, such as the type of locality, ethnicity and the region of Mexico where children live, among others. The study is based on the theoretical notion that children must realize their specific rights, established in the Mexican legal framework, in order to achieve an adequate standard of living and guarantee the well-being and development of children. For this reason, child development has been included as one of the analytical dimensions of poverty, because this has been often discarded in child poverty studies. We support the idea that any violation of social rights means deprivation. The method applied in this research is a conditional latent class analysis and we use covariates which have helped for better predicting the average probabilities of experiencing deprivations in each latent class. Thus, the main objective of the study is to identify groups of children experiencing extreme, moderate and no poverty. The results show that children under five years in Mexico, belonging to the poorest stratum have represented about twenty percent; however, fifty percent of them have experienced moderate poverty and only thirty percent are non-poor. We conclude that universal and targeted policies should be implemented to eradicate multidimensional child poverty.