The United Kingdom: The Economic Consequences of Child Poverty

This chapter looks at the issue of child poverty from two overlapping perspectives: first, its causes and consequences, and second, the justification for and design of programmes that can counter it. The United Kingdom is taken as the core case study because it has undertaken to eliminate child poverty within a generation (by 2020), but this promise can be seen as one element of a wider pan- national concern with extreme poverty and with child poverty. Indeed, child poverty is nearly universally held as a valid justification for state intervention. For this reason, I argue in this chapter for set of commonly held theoretically consistent reasons both for causes of child poverty and justifications for policy intervention. Put simply, this proposes that child poverty is bad for both individuals and hinders economic and social development and that ending child poverty produces both micro and macro socio-economic gains.