Child Poverty in Upper-Income Countries: Lessons from the Luxembourg Income Study

Markus Jäntti () and Janet Gornick

No 509, LIS Working papers from LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg

Abstract: We draw on LIS's various resources to sketch a portrait of child poverty in upper-income countries. We first summarize past LIS-based scholarship on child poverty, highlighting studies that seek to explain cross-national variation in child poverty levels. Our empirical sections focus on child poverty in 13 upper-income countries. We begin with a descriptive overview of poverty among all households and among those with children, presenting multiple poverty measures (relative and absolute, pre- and post- taxes and transfers) and reporting the magnitude of poverty reduction due to state programs. We focus on within-country associations between child poverty and three important characteristics: family type, parents' educational attainment, and parents' attachment to paid work. Our main conclusions include: (a) child poverty rates vary markedly across the mostly high-income countries included in the LIS data archive; (b) child poverty rates shift over time in diverse ways; (c) within countries, family demography and parents' labor market engagement are the main factors that shape children's likelihood of living in a poor household; (d) taxes and transfers powerfully shape the economic wellbeing of children in all countries; (e) the factors that explain poverty variation within countries are not the same as those that explain poverty variation across countries; the latter are mainly institutional, including both labor market structures and policy configurations.

Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2009-01
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published in In From Child Welfare to Child Well-Being, edited by Sheila B. Kamerman, Shelley Phipps, and Asher Ben-Arieh, 339-370. New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2010

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lis:liswps:509

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