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INTRODUCTION
The last decade has witnessed a striking divergence in the economic well-being of children and the elderly, the two most vulnerable age groups in any society. In many industrialized countries, an improvement in the economic situation of the elderly has been accompanied by a deterioration of the economic situation of children. ' According to Eurostat (2000a), 21% of all children in the European Union live in a low-income household, in contrast to 16% for adults.2
In this paper, we investigate the differences between the well-being of different social groups, with a focus on the relative position of individuals living in households with children. We concentrate on Italy and Spain in the mid-1990s since these countries are highly comparable in many crucial aspects, including their living conditions and welfare state institutions. While most studies have restricted the analysis of the well-being of children to monetary indicators (typically poverty rate), we add to the literature by analyzing both monetary and non-monetary indicators. The original contribution of this paper is thus both a methodological one, by demonstrating the lack of correlation between monetary and nonmonetary indicators of well-being, and a substantive one, in documenting the degree of social and economic deprivation of children in Italy and Spain. In particular, and following the approach suggested by Tsakloglou and Papadopoulos (2001), we conclude that individuals living in households with children in the 1990s were at greater risk of social exclusion than individuals living in households without children in both Italy and Spain. Such individuals performed worse than average on every indicator analyzed in this paper, and furthermore, their deprivation tends to persist over time, more so than the rest of the population. The paper also reveals that Italy and Spain are characterized by substantial disparities in all the non-monetary indicators analyzed, but that Spain appears on average more deprived. This is particularly interesting considering that Spain appears as being very similar to Italy when traditional monetary indicators are used (such as the headcount ratio). Results from this paper thus suggest that traditional indicators of poverty are not perfect indicators to identify people who are socially and economically deprived in any given society.
The paper is structured as follows. The next section presents the concept and the measure of social...