UNICEF says one in ten children in Hungary live below poverty line
Just over 10 percent of Hungarian children live below the poverty line, a recent UNICEF report shows.
The relative poverty rate of 10.3 percent puts Hungary in midfield among the 29 European advanced industrial countries surveyed, said Tamas Babel, the United Nations Children's Fund director in Hungary, citing the report based on 2009 figures.
The risk of child poverty is especially acute if parents are jobless or have low qualifications, or the child has a single-parent or immigrant family, he said.
Besides measuring relative poverty, the report also contains a so-called deprivation index which measures a child's access to 14 resources needed for a normal life, including regular food, access to learning and the internet. Here just under one in three Hungarian children is deprived of at least two resources. Out of Europe's 29 countries surveyed, only Bulgaria (56.6 percent) and Romania (72.6 percent) trail Hungary in this index.
