WELLINGTON, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The New Zealand government's target to reduce the proportion of children in poverty from 15 percent now to a world-leading 5 percent within 10 years, remains unchanged following Treasury's corrected and updated projections, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Thursday.
This goal would see New Zealand achieve one of the lowest rates of child poverty in the world, Ardern said.
Meanwhile, the government will prioritize improving the quality of data used to measure child poverty following Treasury's correction to its coding error and updated child poverty projections, Finance Minister Grant Robertson said.
Treasury said its December projection that the Families Package would lift 88,000 children out of poverty by 2021 had been corrected to 64,000. The corresponding figure for the Budget 2017 Family Incomes Package was a fall from 49,000 to 33,000 children lifted out of poverty by 2021 -- a proportionate fall for the two packages, Robertson said.
"The coding error does not impact what families will receive from the Families Package -- 384,000 families will still be better off by an average 75 NZ dollars (55 U.S. dollars) per week," he said.
About 14-15 percent of children in New Zealand live in households earning below 50 percent of the median income before housing costs," Ardern said.