Poor Government and Poor Children: An analysis of government efficiency and sever child deprivation in 70 low-and middle-income countries.

Abstract

During the past decades research on governance and quality of government (QoG) has highlighted the detrimental impact of bad governance on peoples‘ living conditions. At the same time, much thanks to remarkable efforts when it comes to data collection, we have gained new knowledge about global child poverty. In this article these to strands of research are brought together in order to facilitate new and detailed knowledge about the link between QoG and child poverty. We use harmonized micro data measuring seven types of severe deprivation (lack of access to: safe water, food, sanitation, shelter, education, health care, and information) among children in 70 low- and middle-income countries (N=2,120,734). In a series of multi-level regression analysis we estimated the impact of QoG and degree of democratization, controlling for GDP per capita and a set of individual level variables. We show that QoG affected four of the seven deprivation indicators (safe water, food, health care, and information). As a contrast, democratization did not have any impact on child poverty.