Reconciling the Official Poverty Measure and CBO’s Distributional Analysis of Household Income

Congressional Budget Office

No 60809, Reports from Congressional Budget Office

Abstract: CBO’s distributional analysis of household income shows that from 1979 to 2021, income after transfers and taxes among households in the lowest quintile (or fifth) of the income distribu¬tion increased significantly, after adjusting for inflation. However, the Census Bureau’s official poverty measure (OPM) has not decreased significantly over that same period. In this report, CBO investigates that seeming disparity by examining how its method for analyzing the distribution of household income differs from the Census Bureau’s method for calculating the OPM.

JEL-codes: H20 H24 H50 I32 J30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-01-08
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