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This study assesses how child deprivation in Ontario compares to that of Ontario's population in general and that of children in eight European high-income countries (France, Germany, United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden). This research has been motivated by the publication of UNICEF's 10th Child Report Card. Due to lacking data the report card only compares child deprivation for Europe. For Ontario, however, deprivation information is available in the 2009 Ontario Material Deprivation Survey. Being a province that is close to Canada's average socio-economic performance, replicating the report card methodology allows exploring how child deprivation in Ontario, and possibly Canada, compares to Europe. This study finds that Children in Ontario have somewhat higher deprivation levels (11.7%) than the Ontario population as a whole (9.9%). In comparison to the eight European countries, Ontario also has higher child deprivation levels, ranking right after France which has the highest deprivation rates and 19th out of 30 countries. Just like their European peers, deprivation of Ontario children is associated with families consisting of lone parents and fewer employed household members as well as caretakers having low education and / or low income. Nevertheless, the relative disadvantage that such children in Ontario face seems smaller than in the European countries. As in Europe, there is considerable lack of overlap between income poor and materially deprived households: this study finds that about 6% of the children are both income poor and deprived; 6% are deprived only and 10% are income poor only (78% are neither income poor or deprived). In sum, rather than resembling the Nordic countries, child deprivation in Ontario resembles more to that in Belgium, Germany, United Kingdom and especially France. As Canada's current focus on 'low income' measures excludes half of the materially deprived households, these findings suggest that using material deprivation measures would also contribute to a better and more nuanced understanding of poverty in Canada.

The increasing availability of rich (panel) data provides many opportunities to test theories on consumption smoothing behaviour. At the same time, the informational requirements in terms of data and modelling are high and very context specific, thus requiring a filtering of essential explanatory ingredients. In this paper we show how conceptual and exploratory empirical analysis can contribute to this filtering process. We develop a conceptual framework to analyze possible smoothing arrangements of households distinguishing between various smoothing mechanisms, institutional smoothing partners and required assets. Subsequently, we apply this framework to Russian survey data to explore how Russian households may smooth consumption. We select and analyze a broad set of indicators from household survey data to study what actions Russian households take and how these actions reflect the existence and prevalence of particular smoothing channels. The results can be used to formulate hypotheses on household smoothing behaviour and to delineate the features of a more rigorous analysis. The picture that emerges is one in which financial markets play a limited role as a smoothing channel in Russia, regardless of the smoothing mechanism used (saving, lending, insurance). Instead, households seem to use internal strategies, their family, social networks and the state to smooth consumption through capital accumulation, gift giving, the provision of loans and (pension) benefits. Furthermore, we find some evidence that old age pensions may be used for intergenerational risk-sharing within families while other findings point towards the use of household food production as an income smoothing strategy as opposed to a shock-response strategy.

This paper investigates to what extent Russian households have been able to protect their consumption against income shocks during the transition and in what manner the ability to smooth consumption is related to poverty risk. We use data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (1994-2004). Empirical analyses of such panels have often been based on differenced data in order to eliminate individual household effects. An innovative aspect of this study is that we model households smoothing behaviour by means of an Error Correction Mechanism (ECM); this model explicitly distinguishes between short and long run dynamics of consumption and income and thus better exploits the information in the level data. We find that households are only partially able to protect their consumption from income shocks and that income shocks have a smaller impact on food consumption than on non-food consumption. The results also suggest that the population is not homogeneous in terms of consumption smoothing abilities; partial estimations show that consumption smoothing ability improve as the living standard increases. However, below average consumption smoothing abilities are not always associated with higher poverty risk; rural households, who have a high poverty risk, manage to smooth food expenditures quite well, most likely because they have more opportunities to produce their own food. These exploratory results suggest that development and social protection policies should not only play a role in terms of poverty reduction but also influence households' abilities to manage risks.