FLORENCE, Italy, Feb. 14 (UPI) -- British and U.S. children are at the bottom of a U.N. assessment of the well-being of children and young people in advanced economies.
Children from Denmark, Finland, Netherlands and Sweden, Denmark topped the study produced by the U.N. Children's Fund Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, Italy.
The scoring is based on six dimensions to measure the well-being of children, material comfort, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behavior, risks, and young people's own subjective sense of well-being, UNICEF said.
"All countries have weaknesses to be addressed," Innocenti Director Marta Santos Pais said of "Report Card 7: Child Poverty in Perspective."
She said, "No single dimension of well-being stands as a reliable proxy for child well-being as a whole and several Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development countries find themselves with widely differing rankings for different dimensions of children's lives."
The report shows among all of the 21 OECD countries surveyed in the study there is room for improvement and that no single state leads in all six of the areas.
Based on an average ranking position for all six dimensions, Netherlands topped the chart with 4.2, followed by Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Spain, Switzerland, Norway, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Canada, Greece, Poland, Czech Republic, France, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, United States and the United Kingdom, the last two with an average rank of 18 and 18.2 respectively.
The report finds no strong or consistent relationship between per capita gross domestic product and child well-being. The Czech Republic, for example, achieves a higher overall rank for child well-being (12.5) than several much wealthier European countries. Also no country features in the top third of the rankings for all six dimensions.
