Child poverty in OECD countries | Statista (2024)

FAQs

Which OECD country has the highest poverty rate? ›

Out of all OECD countries, Cost Rica had the highest poverty rate as of 2022, at over 20 percent. The country with the second highest poverty rate was the United States, with 18 percent.

On average across OECD countries, 12.8% of children live in relative income poverty (Chart CO2. 2. A), but rates differ considerably from country to country.

Which places have high child poverty prevalence? Sub-Saharan Africa has both the highest rates of children living in extreme poverty at 40 percent and the largest share of the world's extreme poor children, at 71.1 percent.

In the selected set of countries relative child poverty ranges from 5% in Norway—one of the world's lowest rates—to over 20% in the United States, twice as high as in the United Kingdom, Sweden, or France (Fig. 1).

The 5 countries with the highest number of extreme poor are (in descending order): India, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh.

The country with the lowest child poverty rate is Denmark, where 9.9 per cent of children are poor. About 1 in 10 children live in poverty in Finland and Slovenia. In contrast, more than one in four children live in poverty in Bulgaria, Colombia, Italy, Mexico, Romania, Spain, Türkiye and the United States of America.

Approximately 333 million children globally survive on less than US$2.15 a day, 829 million children subsist below a poverty line of US$3.65, and 1.43 billion children are living on less than US$6.85 a day.

When ranking child income poverty rates across 34 OECD nations from lowest to highest, the United States, with one of the highest rates of child poverty, ranks 31st .

There were over 69 million children living in poverty across 40 of the world's richest countries by the end of 2021, according to a recent report by UNICEF, the UN's children's agency.

Which country has the lowest children? ›

In 2023, the fertility rate in Taiwan was estimated to be at 1.09 children per woman, making it the lowest fertility rate worldwide. The fertility rate is the average number of children born per woman of child-bearing age in a country.

Compared to other Western industrialized countries, the United States devotes far fewer resources to programs aimed at assisting the economically vulnerable. In fact, the U.S. allocates a smaller proportion of its GDP to social welfare programs than virtually any other industrialized country.

To summarize, when analyzing poverty as the number of persons who fall below 50 percent of a country's median income, we find that the United States has far and away the highest overall poverty rate in this group of 26 developed nations.

The vast majority of those in extreme poverty reside in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. As of 2018, it is estimated that the country with the most people living in extreme poverty is Nigeria, at 86 million.