 Child poverty and child support policy: A comparative analysis of Colombia and the United StatesLaura Cuesta and Daniel R. Meyer Children and Youth Services Review, 2018, vol. 93, issue C, 143-153 Abstract: Child support may merely reshuffle poverty, reducing child poverty among families who receive it at the expense of the economic well-being of children living with a nonresident parent. Our study examines child support's effects on child poverty, considering those who pay child support and those who receive child support, and doing so in Colombia and the United States (U.S.). We use data from the Colombian Longitudinal Survey (N = 13,036) and the U.S. Current Population Survey (N = 53,480). Our findings show that the antipoverty effectiveness of child support among resident parent families is larger in Colombia than in the U.S. Child support payments do increase child poverty among children living in payer families in both countries, but the effects are fairly small. In our base models, 6%–9% of children in nonresident parent families are falling into poverty after child support payments are transferred to other families. Overall, child support receipts decrease poverty to a greater extent than child support payments increase it among children. Keywords: Child poverty; Child support; Cross-national research (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:93:y:2018:i:c:p:143-153 DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2018.07.013 Access Statistics for this article Children and Youth Services Review is currently edited by Duncan Lindsey More articles in Children and Youth Services Review from Elsevier |
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