Abstract
Poverty is often examined using cross-sectional data, with families categorized as poor by comparing annual income to an annual poverty threshold amount. This approach to conceptualizing poverty does not capture information about the persistence of poverty across multiple years. However, both theory and empirical research suggest that long-term or chronic poverty has different causes and impacts than short-term or transient poverty, particularly for children. This chapter examines poverty persistence among children in the United States. It begins by describing theoretical frameworks from economics and social epidemiology that provide useful lenses for understanding the differences between chronic poverty and transient poverty among children and families. The chapter provides an overview of empirical research on the different impacts of chronic and transient poverty on children’s health and development. Recent data on the prevalence and demographics of chronic and transient child poverty in the United States are then presented. The chapter concludes with suggestions for policy approaches that might address child and family poverty more effectively by specifically targeting chronic versus transient poverty.
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Notes
- 1.
In 2012, the official federal poverty threshold for a family of two adults and two children was US$23,283 (U.S. Census Bureau 2014).
- 2.
The cash-only official definition of annual poverty has some limitations, as it does not account for near-cash or in-kind benefits like food stamps, tax credits, or housing subsidies, which may be important non-cash resources used by families to meet their basic needs. Nor does this definition of poverty account for non-discretionary expenses such as medical out-of-pocket costs or payroll taxes, which may significantly reduce the amount of income available to families to spend on basic needs. Some alternative poverty measures, such as the Supplemental Poverty Measure recently introduced by the U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics, incorporate these and other factors to create more nuanced measures of whether families’ resources are adequate to meet their basic needs. To date, however, longitudinal analysis of U.S. poverty using these alternative measures has not yet been published, hence this chapter focuses on the official cash-based definition of annual poverty that has been used in prior research on poverty persistence in the United States.
- 3.
Due to its long-term panel study design that follows individuals and their offspring over time, the original PSID sample did not include individuals who had immigrated to the U.S. after 1968, the year when the study was initiated. As a result, over time the PSID sample became non-representative of the U.S. immigrant population. This problem was addressed by adding a “refresher” sample of post-1968 immigrant families in the 1997 and 1999 waves of the survey. Prior research on child poverty persistence used earlier years of PSID data, before this immigrant refresher sample was added. The more recent timeframe of our analysis allows us to use the more representative expanded PSID sample.
- 4.
Unexpected one-time expenses can also impact a family’s ability to fund its basic needs over the short-term, though this type of situation does not impact a family’s official poverty status under the cash-income-based official U.S. definition of poverty. A major one-time expense like large medical bills from a serious illness, for example, reduces the amount of family income available to pay for housing, food, and other basic necessities. Such situations can be addressed by policies like the recently adopted Affordable Care Act (ACA), which increases the availability and affordability of quality health insurance for most U.S. residents. The impact of the ACA is yet to be seen, but this policy may be expected to reduce major out-of-pocket medical costs for many families experiencing serious injury or illness, and thus could reduce the number of families experiencing short-term periods of necessary expenses exceeding available income.
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Kimberlin, S., Berrick, J.D. (2015). Poor for How Long? Chronic Versus Transient Child Poverty in the United States. In: Fernandez, E., Zeira, A., Vecchiato, T., Canali, C. (eds) Theoretical and Empirical Insights into Child and Family Poverty. Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17506-5_9
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