How has child poverty changed since 1998-99? An update

Children, Youth and Environments. Vol 14, No.1 (2004) ISSN 1546-2250 Response to Review of Poor Kids in a Rich Country Timothy Smeeding Maxwell's Center for Policy Research Syracuse University Lee Rainwater Harvard University Luxembourg Income Study Citation: Smeeding, Timothy and Lee Rainwater. (2004). “Response to Review of Poor Kids in a Rich Country.” Children, Youth and Environments 14(1). We want to thank the reviewer for a cogent analysis and policy interpretation of our book. This brief response is to say that policy can indeed make a difference. Figure 1 compares child poverty in the UK and in the USA using similar poverty standards— the U.S. poverty line (about 43-45 percent of U.S. median income in 1997) with the UK poverty line (set at 60 percent of UK median income in 1997). In the United Sates we show both the official series (top line) and one that reflects the Luxembourg Income Study’s (LIS) income definition and the changes in poverty measurement recommended by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1995. Since the UK GDP per person was about 70 percent of the U.S. level in that year, these lines measure just about the same “real” level of living. 279 Figure 1. Trends in Absolute Child Poverty: UK vs. U.S., 19892002 Sources: U.S. Census Bureau; Hills, John and Holly Sutherland (2004). "Child Poverty in the UK and the Blair Government: A Progress Report." Conference on the Support of Children, Princeton University, January. Revised April, 2004. Mimeo, CASE Center, London School of Economics. In 1997, Prime Minister Blair announced his policies against child poverty; in 1999 they began to be implemented; by 2001-2002, child poverty in the UK had fallen below that in the United States measured against the same “real” resource level. Note that child poverty in both nations began to fall without the help of policy in the late 1990s owing to the strong economic growth of the period. But as we entered the 21st century, when both economies turned sour, the UK showed that policy can make a difference. The U.S. poverty decline stopped; the UK’s continues. To our reviewer and the readers 280 of CYE, we close by saying there is hope. But, it may take some time to find a leader who reads all of our books and then decides to run for President, making child poverty a key priority. The Blair government experience in the UK may give her or him some hope indeed. Timothy M. Smeeding is the Maxwell Professor of Public Policy, and Director of Maxwell's Center for Policy Research. He is also the Director of the Luxembourg Income Study (www.lisproject.org), a nonprofit research organization which he co-founded with Lee Rainwater in 1983. Professor Smeeding's research is focused on national and cross-national aspects of economic inequality, poverty, and public policy toward vulnerable groups, such as children, the aged, and the disabled. Over the next eight months he will publish three books: The Economics of an Aging Society (with Richard V. Burkhauser, Robert L. Clark, Marilyn Moon, and Joseph F. Quinn; Blackwell Publishers); Poor Kids in a Rich Nation (with Lee Rainwater; Russell Sage Foundation Press); and Public Policy and the Future of the Family, proceedings of a conference held at The Maxwell School in October 2002 (edited with Lee Rainwater, and Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan; Russell Sage Foundation Press). Additional unpublished papers and a complete curriculum vitae may be found on his website at http://www-cpr.maxwell.syr.edu/faculty/smeeding/ Lee Rainwater is professor of sociology emeritus and research director of the Luxembourg Income Study. His books include Poor Kids in a Rich Country: America's Children in Comparative Perspective, with Timothy M. Smeeding, Russell Sage Foundation, 2003; Income Distribution in OECD Countries, with Anthony B. Atkinson and Timothy M. Smeeding, OECD, 1995 ; Public/Private Interplay in Social Protection with Martin Rein, (eds.), M.E. Sharpe and Co., 1986; What Money Buys: Inequality and the Social Meaning of Income, New York: Basic Books, 1974; Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum, Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1970; and And the...

Relative child poverty rose sharply over the period 1979–97/98 and has since fallen by about half a million (4 percentage points). Absolute poverty changed little between 1979 and 1997/98 but has fallen sharply since then. Absolute poverty fell by 1.7 million between 1997/98 and 2001/02, with a half million fall in the last year alone. Changes in work patterns, wages and demographics all contributed to rising relative child poverty between 1979 and 1997/98. Demographics and work changes were responsible for the rise in absolute poverty. Benefit changes offset some of these increases. The absence of work was particularly severe on children in lone parent families. The Blair government’s welfare reforms raised work incentives and resulted in more work among low income families with children. These increases in work had modest effects in reducing child poverty and much of the reduction is attributable to benefit changes — work itself is not enough to pull many families over the poverty line. The Clinton administration introduced a range of welfare to work reforms in the US, increasing aid to those in work but cutting it to those out of work. Child poverty there has fallen but not as sharply. Increased work and demographic change have been the driving forces in poverty reductions. Median incomes, and hence the poverty line have increased rapidly and in conjunction further small increases in wage inequality and demographic shifts have meant that the government is making slower progress in reducing relative poverty than anticipated. While much progress has been made, current and planned policy reforms may not raise the incomes of the poor enough relative to median income to achieve the sort of poverty reductions needed to meet the stated poverty targets.

The 2008 financial crisis triggered the first contraction of the world economy in the post-war era. This article investigates the effect of the Great Recession on child poverty across the EU-27 plus Iceland, Norway and Switzerland and studies the extent to which social protection spending may have softened the negative impact of the economic crisis on children. While the risks of child poverty are substantially higher in countries with higher rates of working-age unemployment, suggesting a significant impact of the Great Recession on household incomes via the labour market, the study finds evidence for social protection spending cushioning the blow of the crisis at least to some extent. Children were significantly less likely to be poor in countries with higher levels of social protection spending in 2008–2013, even after controlling for the socio-demographic structure of the population, per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and the working-age unemployment rate. The poverty-dampening contextual effect of social spending was greater for the poverty risks of children in very low work intensity families and large families. The study uses two complementary thresholds of income poverty, both based on 60 percent of the national median: a relative poverty line and a threshold anchored in 2008. Although the choice of a poverty line makes a difference to aggregate child poverty rates, individual-level risks of a child being poor associated with a range of household-level characteristics are similar for the two poverty lines.

This paper offers evidence on the sensitivity of child poverty in South Africa to changes in the adult equivalence scale (AES) and updates the child poverty profile based on the Income and Expenditure Survey 2005/06. Setting the poverty line at the 40th percentile of households calculated with different AESs the scope and composition of child poverty are found to be relatively insensitive to the scale used. The rankings of children of different ages, girls versus boys, racial groupings and children living in rural versus urban areas are unaffected by choice of AES, although some provincial rankings on the poverty headcount measure are. The proportions of children and households ‘correctly’ identified as poor for the full range of scales is extremely high. These findings support the argument that it may be appropriate for profiling poverty in South Africa to use a poverty line based on a per capita welfare measure. For the construction of the child poverty profile, per capita income is used as the welfare indicator with the poverty line set at the 40th percentile of household. The profile suggests that poverty amongst children is more extensive than amongst the population or adults even after the massive injection of transfers into households with poor children through the child support grant. The child poverty headcount, depth and severity are all highest amongst children age 0–4 and lowest amongst those aged 15–17, who are not yet beneficiaries of the grants. They are also highest amongst African and Coloured children. Large variations across provinces remain. The analysis underlines the importance of prioritising children in the fight against poverty, particularly in their earliest years.

Poverty is a complex issue that involves more than just income levels, affecting various aspects of life such as health, education, and living conditions. The ongoing discussion about how to measure poverty, whether through absolute or relative terms, reflects the challenges in assessing it. Absolute poverty is based on a set standard that focuses on meeting basic needs for survival, while relative poverty looks at income disparities within a society. This study explores existing research on multidimensional poverty and examines the debate between absolute and relative poverty measures, considering their respective advantages and disadvantages. A notable conclusion from the research is that multidimensional poverty indices (MPIs), like the Multidimensional Poverty Index, provide a broad view of deprivation by including multiple factors. MPIs help policymakers design more targeted interventions in areas such as education, healthcare, and living standards. However, absolute poverty measures, such as the World Bank’s $1.90-per-day threshold, are still essential for tracking extreme poverty in developing nations, offering a clear benchmark for international comparisons. In contrast, relative poverty measures are particularly relevant in wealthier nations, where inequality and social exclusion are more prominent factors in poverty. This study highlights gaps in how these different approaches are integrated and calls for further research to improve models that address both absolute and relative poverty. The findings suggest that combining multidimensional, absolute, and relative poverty measures is important for fully understanding poverty and creating effective strategies to reduce it, adapted to the needs of specific regions and contexts.

The use of the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program by Chlebowski et al1 inspired an analysis with ages that are more in keeping with inclusion criteria for the Women's Health Initiative (WHI).2 For Black and White women aged 50 to 64 years and Black and White women aged 65 to 79 years, SEER*stat 8.3.6 calculated annual 1992 to 2014 incidence rates and SEs for invasive mammary carcinomas with relevant histologic diagnoses (codes 8095/3, 8140-8141/3, 8255/3, 8260/3, 8314-8315/3, 8500-8502/3, 8507/3, 8514/3, 8521-8524/3, 8530/3, 8540-8541/3, 8562/3, 8570-8575/3, and 8520/3) and none diagnosed from autopsy only from SEER 13 cancer registries.3 The Joinpoint Regression Program 4.8.0.1 calculated point estimates and SEs of annual percent changes (APCs) of rates and years when the APC changed, so-called joinpoints. Joinpoint 4.8.0.1 also performed the parallelism test. Because the test rejected the theory that White women aged 50 to 64 years and 65 to 79 years had the same joinpoints and APCs (P = .006), age groups were analyzed individually. However, because the test did not reject this theory for Black women (P = .10), age groups were analyzed together. When the P value was <.05, the results were deemed statistically significant; otherwise, they were considered nonsignificant. Rate changes with absolute APC values of 0.0 to 0.9 were deemed slow, those with absolute APC values of 1.0 to 1.9 were deemed moderate, those with APC values of 2.0 to 3.0 were deemed rapid, and those with APC values >7.0 were deemed extremely rapid. Figure 1 displays results of Joinpoint regression analyses. For White women aged 50 to 64 years, a significant, rapid decline in the rate for 2000 through 2004 of −2.9 APC was preceded by a nonsignificant, slow rate decline of −0.2 APC, followed by a period (2004-2017) without a rate change (0.0 APC). For White women aged 65 to 79 years, the year 1992 had the highest recorded rate, at 824.5 diagnoses per 100,000 women-years. A nonsignificant, rapid decline in the rate for 1992 through 1994 of −2.5 APC was followed by a nonsignificant, moderate rise in the rate for 1994 through 1998 at 1.0 APC. A significant, rapid decline followed in the rate for 1998 through 2004 at 2.3 APC. A nonsignificant, slow rise in the rate for 2004 through 2013 of 0.4 APC was followed by a nonsignificant, slow rate decline of −0.9 APC. The findings suggest that, for White women aged <80 years who are insured by Medicare, rates began declining before 2000, and possibly as early as 1992. For both groups of White women, joinpoint regression estimated that rate declines began before the 2001 WHI publication,2 thereby calling into question the relationship between the WHI and breast cancer incidence. For Black women, a nonsignificant, slow rate decline for 1992 through 2005 of −0.2 APC was followed by a significant, moderate rise in the rate for 2005 through 2012 of 1.1 APC, and a significant, rapid decline in the rate for 2012 through 2017 of −2.0 APC. Because life expectancy increases over time, assuming constancy over a long period of proportions of a population corresponding to age groups >49 years deflates age-adjusted rates before and inflates them after the set point. Chlebowski et al1 age-adjusted rates to the US standard population in the year 2000, resulting in the appearance, denied by this analysis, of a 40-year increase in breast cancer rates among Black women, and a failure to find the rapid decline in breast cancer rates among Black women since 2012. A joinpoint regression analysis of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) prescription data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey4 found 2 significant, extremely rapid declines in prescriptions for women aged ≥50 years: −26.2 APC for 2001 through 2004 and −10.3 APC for 2004 through 2012. The analysis performed in that study,4 which was not of mammary carcinoma rates in toto but rather of invasive ductal carcinoma rates and invasive lobular carcinoma rates, found no relationship between those rates and HRT prescriptions. The current analysis echoes those findings, especially given the decline in HRT prescriptions from 2004 through 2012, providing evidence against the theory that HRT increases the risk of breast cancer. The study was funded by National Institutes of Health (5R01CA190710-05). Mitchell Wachtel has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health (5R01CA190710-05) for work performed as part of the current study.

Subject. This article discusses the economic opportunities of households and the issues of population welfare. Objectives. The article aims to identify the main causes of child poverty and analyze the programmes implemented in the Samara Oblast to support various population groups. Methods. For the study, I used statistical, dynamic, structural, and comparative analyses. Results. The article finds that a significant number of households with children fall into the low-income category in the Samara Oblast. There are many factors affecting the level of child poverty. The article emphasizes that strengthening the targeting of social assistance, improving the social contract system, and digitizing social services should be the main areas for developing social policy to alleviate child poverty. Conclusions. The proposed measures implementation can help improve the efficiency of the social assistance system, reduce child poverty, and improve the quality of life for families with children.

Poverty is rather high in contemporary Russia: every eighth Russian was poor according to the official statistics in 2018. Fighting poverty is among the top strategic development goals for the period till 2024. The paper studies gender disparities in poverty among Russian adults. Better understanding of gender structure of poverty in Russia would facilitate poverty reduction via better targeting and better tailoring of policy instruments. We utilize micro data of the Survey of income and social program participation by Rosstat as of 2017 for our statistical analysis. Two alternative poverty concepts are used: absolute income poverty (the official methodology of poverty measurement in Russia) and poverty risk and social exclusion index (the key component of poverty monitoring indicator in the EU). The latter index is a composition of relative poverty and deprivation poverty measures. Our results indicate that, on average, there is no gender poverty gap in Russia when absolute poverty concept is used: poverty rates among males and females are the same on average. Hence, we find no statistical support to the widely used by the media thesis of poverty feminization in Russia. Absolute poverty rate, however, is found to vary significantly across different gender-age groups: absolute income poverty among females is higher than among males in young and senior ages, while males are poorer in mid-age groups. When multiple criteria definition of poverty and social exclusion (AROPE) is applied, we find clear signs of feminization of poverty in Russia. Multidimensional poverty is much higher among females, and this is observed in all age groups. The highest gender poverty gap is observed in senior ages. The age-gender poverty structure changes dramatically when we move from absolute poverty concept to the multidimensional one: we observe higher share of females in poverty, and higher share of senior people in poverty. The key determinants of higher multidimensional poverty of females is their relatively (to males) lower wages, and relatively lower pensions.

The power of naming is capturing the interest of social work practitioners, particularly those who seek to provide gender- and ethnic-sensitive interventions. Dividing families into categories such as intact or broken pejoratively labels mother-headed families, which actually reflect the maternal commitment and strength of women managing on their own (Abramovitz, 1991). Most one-parent families are headed by women, and a disproportionate number are headed by women of color (Van Den Bergh & Cooper, 1986). So divisive dichotomies place women and people of color in positions that legitimize their disempowered social status (Van Den Bergh & Cooper, 1986). The way practitioners refer to and categorize both individuals and families affects problem definitions, interventions, and the helping process in general. A nonintact seeking professional help with a problematic parent-child interaction risks being confronted by a practitioner who attributes family problems to inadequate structure rather than to the normative developmental phases of childhood and family life cycles. Mothers who raise children alone often internalize low expectations about their ability to head families and subsequently develop worried well syndromes. That is, they may attribute all family conflicts to their inability to parent their children alone. The negative impact of pejorative naming has reached full cycle when problems associated with the life cycle of the family, such as adolescent individuation, are attributed by the mother herself to her inability to parent her children in a one-parent home. Placing families in a deviant category is but one of the artificial dichotomies that have negative consequences for mother-headed families. Such dualistic thinking results in other cleavages of women's experiences that, in the interest of the well-being of women and their families, are best perceived in an integrative fashion. The traditional polarity between work and leisure, for example, does not fit the life experiences of women who face multiple challenges associated with the interface of wage labor and child rearing. Employment and family responsibilities are inseparable components of women's lives. Affordable child care, for example, is requisite to mothers being able to participate in the labor market and to provide for their families. Interface of Wage Labor and Child Rearing When wage labor and child rearing are artificially separated as two distinct areas for social policies and programs, comprehensive services that could enable women to perform both roles are overlooked. Guaranteed child support awards (for child rearing) and work training (for employment) are essential to raise impoverished mothers and their children above the poverty level (National Center for Children in Poverty, 1992). Because a majority of fathers do not pay the full amount of child support determined by the courts, the government provides subsidies to mothers and collects payments from fathers. In the United States, 50 percent of all single mother-headed families live below the poverty level, compared with 8 percent of single father-headed families (Gordon, 1990). In addition, mother-headed families are fully one-third of the homeless population (Bassuk, 1991). Gender differences in family poverty rates need to be assessed in terms of persistent gaps in earnings; women still earn only 74 percent of male annual wages (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1990). Disparities in earnings are even more pronounced for black and Latino mothers. Nearly one-third of black single mothers who worked for pay in 1987 were below the poverty level, whereas 17 percent of white single mothers in the labor market were poor (Gordon, 1990). Discrimination in hiring based on race and ethnicity also hinders mothers receiving child support payments, because men of color earn disproportionally lower wages compared with their white counterparts. The solution to family poverty is not simply employment, but employment that pays at least $6 to $7 per hour to raise the family out of poverty (Bane, Ellwood, Jargowsky, & Wilson, 1989). …

Towards a relational understanding of child poverty: Care and adverse inclusion among street-affiliated children in Peru

The National Income Dynamics Study offers important new opportunities for exploring the dynamics of poverty in South Africa. This paper provides a largely descriptive overview of the situation of children in South Africa, drawing on the first wave of the panel study. It finds that children and households with children remain disproportionately represented in rural areas under traditional authority, and that children have proportionately lower levels of access to services and adequate living environments than adults. Many children live in households where their parents are absent, for a range of reasons including orphaning and adult migration. These children are cared for almost entirely by relatives, highlighting the importance of extended kinship networks in providing family care, particularly in the context of high mortality and labour migration rates. The income poverty analysis applies a range of poverty lines and finds that children are, on average, poorer than adults. Even using a relatively low poverty line equivalent to R515 per month in 2008, two thirds of children live in income poverty, and this rate increases substantially for children in rural areas. The severity of child poverty is related to the fact that over a third of children live in households where no adults are employed. While social grants are critical for reducing poverty levels, the widest reaching grant – the Child Support Grant – makes a relatively small impact on child poverty because the amount of the grant is set very low. Larger grants, such as the Old Age Pension and Disability Grants, have a far greater effect on reducing child poverty even though they are not intended for children.

The replacement of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) with a child allowance has been advocated by numerous policymakers and researchers. We estimate the anti-poverty, targeting, and labor supply effects of such a change by linking survey data with administrative tax and government program data which form part of the Comprehensive Income Dataset (CID). We focus on the provisions of the 2021 Build Back Better Act, which would have increased maximum benefit amounts to $3,000 or $3,600 per child (up from $2,000 per child) and made the full credit available to all low and middle-income families regardless of earnings or income. Initially ignoring any behavioral responses, we estimate that the replacement of the CTC would reduce child poverty by 34% and deep child poverty by 39%. The change to a child allowance would have a larger anti-poverty effect on children than any existing government program, though at a higher cost per child raised above the poverty line than any other means-tested program. Relatedly, the child allowance would allocate a smaller share of its total dollars to families at the bottom of the income distribution-as well as families with the lowest levels of long-term income, education, or health-than any existing means-tested program with the exception of housing assistance. We then simulate anti-poverty effects accounting for labor supply responses. By replacing the CTC (which contained substantial work incentives akin to the EITC) with a child allowance, the policy change would reduce the return to working at all by at least $2,000 per child for most workers with children. Relying on elasticity estimates consistent with mainstream simulation models and the academic literature, we estimate that this change in policy would lead 1.5 million workers (constituting 2.6% of all working parents) to exit the labor force. The decline in employment and the consequent earnings loss would mean that child poverty would only fall by at most 22% and deep child poverty would not fall at all with the policy change.

BackgroundDifferent forms of vitamin E may have a different association with cognitive function, which might vary by the APOE E4 allele status. We aim to examine vitamin E from different sources and in varying forms and their relation to cognitive decline among those with and without the APOE E4 allele.MethodsWe included 2,014 participants from the Chicago Health and Aging Project (62% African Americans, 63% female). Global cognition was assessed using a composite score of episodic memory, perceptual speed, and the MMSE. Diet was assessed by a 139‐item FFQ. APOE genotype was assessed by hME Sequenom mass‐array platform. Mixed models were adjusted for age, sex, education, smoking status, calorie intake, alcohol consumption, use of supplements, time since baseline, and the interaction term of time with each covariate.ResultsA higher dietary vitamin E was associated with slower cognitive decline. Those in the highest quintile of dietary vitamin E intake had 28% slower cognitive decline than the lowest quintile (β = 0.014, p = 0.02). A higher intake of dietary αlpha‐tocopherol was associated with slower cognitive decline in participants with APOE E4 allele, but not among those without. In participants with APOE E4 allele and in the highest quintile of alpha‐tocopherol intake had a 16.4% slower rate of global cognitive decline than those in the lowest quintile (β = 0.015, p = 0.0015). A higher intake of delta‐tocopherol was associated with a slower decline in individuals without the APOE E4 allele only. Among those without the APOE E4 allele and in the highest quintile, the rate of global cognitive decline was slower by 22% than the lowest quintile (β = 0.012, p = 0.0014). We found no significant associations between beta‐ and gamma‐tocopherol intakes and cognitive decline among those with and without the APOE E4 allele.ConclusionOur study found a positive association of alpha‐tocopherol with cognitive decline among those with the APOE E4 allele and delta‐tocopherol with the decline in those without the APOE E4 allele. Our findings suggest that different forms of vitamin E might have a different association with cognitive decline in older adults depending on their APOE E4 allele status.

This paper presents a new approach to child poverty measurement that reflects the breadth and components of child poverty. The Alkire and Foster method presented in this paper seeks to answer the question “who is poor” by considering the intensity of each child’s poverty. Once children are identified as poor, the measures aggregate information on poor children’s deprivations in a way that can be broken down to see where and how children are poor. The resulting measures go beyond the headcount by taking into account the breadth, depth or severity of dimensions of child poverty. The paper illustrates one way to apply this method to child poverty measurement, using Bangladeshi data from four rounds of the Demographic Health Survey covering the period 1997-2007. Results for Bangladesh show that the AF adjusted headcount ratio adds value because it produces a different ranking than the simple headcount, because it also reflects the simultaneous deprivations children experience (intensity). Given this, we argue that child poverty should not be assessed only according to the incidence of poverty but also by the intensity of deprivations that batter poor children’s lives at the same time. The Bangladesh example is used to illustrate how to compute and interpret the child poverty figures, how the final measure can be broken down by groups and by dimensions in order to analyse child poverty, how to interpret changes over time, and how to undertake robustness checks concerning the poverty cut-off.

Social Disparities In Health: An Anglo-European Perspective