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On 14 February 2007, UNICEF published a report (Child poverty in perspective: an overview of child well-being in rich countries: a comprehensive assessment of the lives and well-being of children and adolescents in the economically advanced nations (Report Card 7)) which brings together the best of currently available data to provide an overview of the well-being of children in 21 industrialised countries.
The report measures and compares overall child well-being across six dimensions: material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviours and risks, and young people’s own subjective sense of their own well-being. In total, 40 separate indicators of child well-being, from relative poverty and child safety, to educational achievement to drug abuse, are brought together in this overview to present a picture of the lives of children.
The report shows that there is no strong or consistent relationship between per capita GDP and child well-being. It shows that no single dimension of well-being stands as a reliable proxy for child well-being as a whole, and that OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries have widely differing rankings for different dimensions of child well-being.
The lack of common definitions and comparable data have, for the moment,
ruled out the inclusion of two other important indicators - mental and emotional
health and child abuse and neglect
The report can be viewed on the UNICEF
website