Whither poverty in Great Britain and the United States? The determinants of changing poverty and whether work will work

Richard Dickens and David T. Ellwood

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We provide a comparison of poverty levels in Britain and the US based on a set of common definitions. We then ask what factors û demographic, economic, or policy û account for the observed changes in poverty in the two nations and what role could policy play in reducing poverty? We find that the forces influencing poverty differ between nations and across absolute and relative poverty measures. Demographic and wage change is a dominant force in both nations. Government benefits reduced relative and absolute poverty considerably in Britain over this period but had little impact in the US. However, policy changes may have significantly increased work in the US, particularly among single parents, whereas in Britain they may have had the reverse effect. The UK government has committed itself to reducing child poverty by half over the next 10 years and to its abolition within 20 years. We conclude that any purely work-based strategy, which doesn''t tackle demographics and wage dispersion, may not have a dramatic effect on relative poverty.

JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 74 pages
Date: 2001-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/20109/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Whither Poverty in Great Britain and the United States? The Determinants of Changing Poverty and Whether Work Will Work (2004)
Working Paper: Whither Poverty in Great Britain and the United States? The Determinants of Changing Poverty and Whether Work Will Work (2001)
Working Paper: Whither Poverty in Great Britain and the United States? The Determinants of Changing Poverty and Whether Work Will Work (2001)
Working Paper: Whither Poverty in Great Britain and the United States? The Determinants of Changing Poverty and Whether Work Will Work (2001)
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:ehl:lserod:20109

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().