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Following a review of the most important approaches to the studyof poverty the paper shows that child poverty is defined as severe deprivationin two or more basic needs of food, water, sanitation facilities, health,shelter, education and information. Like all other quantitative approaches thestudy of child poverty requires specifying thresholds for severe deprivationfor each of the basic needs, on the basis of which observations are aggregatedto arrive at the percentage of children under 18 years living in poverty. Thereviewed evidence shows that 40% of Arab children seem to have lived inabsolute poverty over the period 1991-2001, a performance worse than theaverage for the developing world