Global and Regional Trends in Child Marriage

Abstract

Nguyen and Wodon suggest that better measurement of child marriage can be obtained by adopting the techniques used for the measurement of poverty. The objective of this article is to use that approach to provide estimates of global and regional trends over time in the extent of child marriage – not only its incidence, but also what we refer to as the child marriage gap and the squared child marriage gap, two measures that take into account how young girls are when they marry.