Innocenti Report Card

In keeping with UNICEF's mandate to advocate for children in every country, the Centre's Report Card series focuses on the well-being of children in industrialized countries. Each Report Card includes a league table ranking the countries of the OECD according to their record on the subject under discussion. The Report Cards are designed to appeal to a wide audience while maintaining academic rigour.

This report offers multiple and detailed perspectives on how the recession has affected children in the developed world. Official data have been used to rank the impact on children for countries in the European Union (EU) and/or the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). For each country, the extent and character of the crisis’s impact on children has been shaped by the depth of the recession, pre-existing economic conditions, the strength of the social safety net and, most importantly, policy responses.

This report is a Japanese version of the UNICEF Innocenti Report Card 11. In the original report, Japan was not included in the league table of child well-being because data on a number of indicators were missing.

The Report card considers five dimensions of children’s lives: material well-being, health and safety, education, behaviours and risks, and housing and environment. In total, 26 internationally comparable indicators have been included in the overview. The Report updates and refines the first UNICEF overview of child well-being published in 2007 (Report Card 7 ). Changes in child well-being over the first decade of the 2000s are examined.

This report sets out the latest internationally comparable data on child deprivation and relative child poverty. Taken together, these two different measures offer the best currently available picture of child poverty across the world's wealthiest nations.

This Report Card presents a first overview of inequalities in child well-being for 24 of the world’s richest countries. Three dimensions of inequality are examined: material well-being, education, and health. In each case and for each country, the question asked is ‘how far behind are children being allowed to fall?’ Bringing in data from the majority of OECD countries, the report attempts to show which of them are allowing children to fall behind by more than is necessary in education, health and material well-being, using the best performing countries as a minimum standard for what can be achieved.

A great change is coming over childhood in the world's richest countries. Today's rising generation is the first in which a majority are spending a large part of early childhood in some form of out-of-home child care. At the same time, neuroscientific research is demonstrating that loving, stable, secure, and stimulating relationships with caregivers in the earliest months and years of life are critical for every aspect of a child’s development. Taken together, these two developments confront public and policymakers in OECD countries with urgent questions. Whether the child care transition will represent an advance or a setback for today's children and tomorrow's world will depend on the response.

This report builds and expands upon the analyses of Report Card No. 6 which considered relative income poverty affecting children and policies to mitigate it. Report Card 7 provides a pioneering, comprehensive picture of child well being through the consideration of six dimensions: material well-being, health and safety, education, family and peer relationships, subjective well-being, behaviours and lifestyles informed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and relevant academic literature.

The proportion of children living in poverty has risen in a majority of the world's developed economies. No matter which of the commonly-used poverty measures is applied, the situation of children is seen to have deteriorated over the last decade. This publication is the sixth in a series of Innocenti Report Cards designed to monitor and compare the performance of the OECD countries in meeting the needs of their children.

In the industrialized world, approximately 3,500 children die every year at the hands of those who should be caring for them. Many more live on with injuries - both physical and emotional. This fifth Report Card analyses and compares child abuse data from the OECD nations and asks why some countries have a better record than others.

This new report from the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre considers the effectiveness of public education systems across the rich nations of the industrialised world. The Report Card takes an overview of several well-respected cross-national surveys into educational performance in an effort to present a big picture of the extent of educational disadvantage in OECD member countries.