The direct costs of a child

The direct costs of a child are explored in order to measure the adequacy of the foster care allowance in meeting a foster child’s basic needs: that is, the costs of feeding, clothing, housing, health care, leisure, education and so forth, at median living standards. Behavioural, consensual and budget standard methods have been used to estimate the direct costs of a child. Attempts at analysing the actual expenditure of a child from household data has been more successful in America than in Britain. One way to identify child costs is to collect the information when the household expenditure survey is carried out. Economists use large surveys of expenditure to construct equivalence scales to infer the comparative cost of a child. In Britain in 1985, a group of social scientists and researchers interested in the domestic economy in the United Kingdom set up the Family Budget Unit.