U.S. POOR ARE AMONG WORLD'S POOREST
(After Children Now posted its Welfare Action Alert last week, it
received several requests for more information about the
Luxembourg Income Study. Below is an abstract of a New York
Times report on the Luxembourg Study produced by Handsnet.)
The New York Times reports that a new study by
the Luxembourg Income Study, a nonprofit group based in
Walferdange, Luxembourg, shows that poor children in the
United States are poorer than the children in most other
Western industrialized nations.
The United States has the second highest level of economic
output per person of the countries examined and has the most
prosperous affluent children of any of the 18 nations.
According to the study, only poor children in Israel and
Ireland are worse off than poor American youths.
Timothy M. Smeeding, one of the study's authors said the
American lead in overall prosperity has dwindled since the
1960s, income inequality has risen briskly in the United
States and child poverty spread in the 1970s and 1980s,
although it may have leveled off in the early part of this
decade.
Some conservative economists question the validity of
studies that attempt to compare levels of income and
distribution of wealth among nations with different economic
systems and societies. However, there is general acceptance
of the idea that the United States has proportionately more
of its children in poverty than other affluent countries.
Smeeding said there appeared to be several reasons why the
United States had such extreme poverty among children.
- The United States also has fewer generous social programs
than the other 17 countries in the study, which are
Australia, Canada, Israel, and 14 European countries:
Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Finland, France,
Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway,
Sweden and Switzerland.
- American households with children tend to be less affluent
than the average American household.
- American mothers are less likely than European mothers to
return to work quickly after childbirth, partly because
inexpensive, high-quality child care is more widely
available in Europe.
Douglas J. Besharov of the American Economic Institute,
suggested that the number of poor children in the United
States reflects the high number of poor immigrants and unwed
teen-age mothers here.
The Luxembourg Income Study was financed by the National
Science Foundation in Washington and similar agencies from
18 other governments. Its staff has been working for the
last decade to develop ways to make reliable international
comparisons. The group is a repository for computerized data
on income distribution from 25 countries around the
world, which it makes available free to social researchers.
- The United States has the widest gap between rich and
poor.
Contact: children@hopf.dnai.com