Basic Needs Budgets Revisited: Does the U.S. Consumer Price Index Overestimate the Changes in the Cost of Living for Low-Income Families?

Trudi Renwick

Feminist Economics, 1998, vol. 4, issue 3, 129-142

Abstract: The consumer price index (CPI) is used in the United States to measure changes in the cost of living. Since the CPI is used to index the official U.S. poverty guidelines and to establish eligibility criteria for various public assistance programs, a change in the methodology used to calculate the CPI would impact the accuracy of poverty statistics and, more importantly, poor families' access to public assistance. Since the majority of these poor families are headed by women, the CPI becomes a critical issue for feminist economics. In December 1996 the United States Senate Finance Committee's Advisory Commission to Study the Consumer Price Index issued its final report which concluded that use of the consumer price index results in widespread substantial overindexing. This paper uses the basic needs budgets (BNB) to evaluate changes in the cost of living for low-income families. The author compares the cost of the BNBs for single-parent families in 1983 and 1996 and finds that the cost of the bundle of goods and services included in the BNBs has increased faster than the CPI. The author finds similar results for two-parent families.

Keywords: Poverty; Single-parent Families; Poverty Measurement; Boskin Report; Basic Needs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/135457098338338 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:femeco:v:4:y:1998:i:3:p:129-142

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFEC20

DOI: 10.1080/135457098338338

Access Statistics for this article

Feminist Economics is currently edited by Diana Strassmann

More articles in Feminist Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().