This article posits the issue of American poverty and governments' inability to significantly alter this adverse social condition. While data suggests there has been a substantial and measurable improvement in poverty rates over the past four decades, the fact remains, poverty is an inherent and...

We propose a new measure of the rate of poverty we call the Supplemental Expenditure Poverty Measure (SEPM) based on expenditure in the Consumer Expenditure survey. It treats household expenditure as a measure of resources available to purchase the minimum bundle necessary to meet basic needs....

Official poverty methodologies differ from other poverty measurement methods in the sense that the official ones are more often used as a benchmark to develop new policies as well as to evaluate the performance of existing programs. Europe has the tradition and the practice to use relative...

On the international stage, poverty is increasingly understood multi-dimensionally as a deprivation of wellbeing in several dimensions rather than solely as a lack of income or low consumption. In the U.S., recent research shows that many people who are not counted as poor under the official or...

Official poverty thresholds are based on the implicit assumption that the household with poverty-level income possesses sufficient time for household production to enable it to reproduce itself as a unit. Several authors have questioned the validity of the assumption and explored alternative...

This paper introduces a series of augmentations to the Current Population Survey to allow for more accurate estimations of American poverty outcomes and a more fruitful integration of the U.S. into comparative research. The augmentations address three shortcomings in recent poverty research,...

This paper estimates income gap ratios and Gini coefficients of poor Americans and combines them with official U.S. government poverty statistics to create a new time series of Sen indices of poverty. The effects of growth and other determinants of aggregate poverty are investigated over the...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic two new timely poverty measures have been developed to monitor fast-changing economic conditions for the most deprived. The Han et al. near real-time poverty measure uses responses to a global income question on the Monthly Current Population Survey (CPS)...

Substantial cross-national differences in poverty alleviation are well documented, but theextent to which different parts of the social transfer system account for this variation is still relatively unexamined. This study analyses the redistributive effects of specific social policy institutions...