This means that the number of children experiencing simultaneous child and monetary poverty had dropped by more than 20 million. The question is whether the remaining 40 million children form a hard core of multidimensional poverty (including monetary poverty) as a result of geographical isolation, social exclusion or discrimination, or whether their living standards could be improved fairly rapidly, as has happened with the 23 million children who have escaped simultaneous child and monetary poverty. This category remained almost constant and the value was the same by around 2011, suggesting that the reduction in the number of poor (by both methods) stemmed, in part, from higher household income that had not necessarily improved objective living standards for children. Similarly, the percentage of non-poor children experiencing household monetary poverty increased from 15.8% (25.7 million) to 18.0% (29 million).