14 February 2007 The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Finland
are at the top and the United States and the United Kingdom at
the bottom of a United Nations score card launched today that
provides the first comprehensive assessment of the well-being of
children and young people in the world’s advanced economies. The
study, produced by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Innocenti
Research Centre in Florence, Italy, is based on six dimensions
to measure the well-being of children – material well-being,
health and safety, education, peer and family relationships,
behaviours and risks, and young people’s own subjective sense of
well-being. “All countries have weaknesses to be addressed,”
Innocenti Director Marta Santos Pais said of the Report Card 7:
Child Poverty in Perspective. “No single dimension of well-being
stands as a reliable proxy for child well-being as a whole and
several OECD countries find themselves with widely differing
rankings for different dimensions of children’s lives,” she
added, referring to th