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U.S. Poor Children are Among the World's Poorest

From Handsnet. 23 August, 1995

After posting our Welfare Action Alert last week, we 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.

U.S. Poor are Among World's Poorest

8/14/95 -- 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 has the widest gap between rich and poor.
• The United States also has fewer generous social programs than the other seventeen 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 twenty-five countries around the world, which it makes available free to social researchers.

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8/14/95 -- HandsNet -- HN0021