Deep and Extreme Child Poverty in Rich and Poor Nations: Lessons from Atkinson for the Fight Against Child Poverty

Yixia Cai () and Timothy Smeeding ()

No 780, LIS Working papers from LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg

Abstract: The paper documents child poverty levels and trends using both relative (‘deep’) and absolute (‘extreme’) measures in two clusters: Anglo–Saxon high-income countries and upper middleincome countries. We also investigate the influence of different components of household income and other resources on child deep-poverty rates to examine the role of the market and the redistributive effects that materialize through private transfers, public benefits, and tax systems on generating poverty reduction. Overall, middle-income nations have witnessed continuous reductions in their extreme child poverty rates, while mild decreases or fluctuations have been observed in the five high-income nations, with the U.S. highlighted by its relatively high rates of deep and extreme poverty regardless of absolute or relative measures and type of equivalence scale used. Private institutions play a larger role in poverty reduction in middle-income nations compared to its impact on developed nations. The degree of dependence on univeral or assistance benefits varies among high-income nation. In the U.S., universal programs tend to be meager, while Australian social insurance and universal benefit are robust in their fight against deep poverty. Brazil stands out by its overwhelmingly large proportion of social insurance programs that contribute to improvements of its deep child poverty situation, and South Africa’s assistance benefit system performs better in lifting children out of deep poverty.

JEL-codes: I30 I32 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2019-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Italian Economic Journal (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40797-019-00116-w

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/780.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lis:liswps:780

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIS Working papers from LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Piotr Paradowski ().