Abstract
Poverty is often examined using cross-sectional data, with families categorized as poor by comparing annual income to an annual poverty threshold amount. This approach to conceptualizing poverty does not capture information about the persistence of poverty across multiple years. However, both theory and empirical research suggest that long-term or chronic poverty has different causes and impacts than short-term or transient poverty, particularly for children. This chapter examines poverty persistence among children in the United States. It begins by describing theoretical frameworks from economics and social epidemiology that provide useful lenses for understanding the differences between chronic poverty and transient poverty among children and families. The chapter provides an overview of empirical research on the different impacts of chronic and transient poverty on children’s health and development. Recent data on the prevalence and demographics of chronic and transient child poverty in the United States are then presented. The chapter concludes with suggestions for policy approaches that might address child and family poverty more effectively by specifically targeting chronic versus transient poverty.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
In 2012, the official federal poverty threshold for a family of two adults and two children was US$23,283 (U.S. Census Bureau 2014).
- 2.
The cash-only official definition of annual poverty has some limitations, as it does not account for near-cash or in-kind benefits like food stamps, tax credits, or housing subsidies, which may be important non-cash resources used by families to meet their basic needs. Nor does this definition of poverty account for non-discretionary expenses such as medical out-of-pocket costs or payroll taxes, which may significantly reduce the amount of income available to families to spend on basic needs. Some alternative poverty measures, such as the Supplemental Poverty Measure recently introduced by the U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics, incorporate these and other factors to create more nuanced measures of whether families’ resources are adequate to meet their basic needs. To date, however, longitudinal analysis of U.S. poverty using these alternative measures has not yet been published, hence this chapter focuses on the official cash-based definition of annual poverty that has been used in prior research on poverty persistence in the United States.
- 3.
Due to its long-term panel study design that follows individuals and their offspring over time, the original PSID sample did not include individuals who had immigrated to the U.S. after 1968, the year when the study was initiated. As a result, over time the PSID sample became non-representative of the U.S. immigrant population. This problem was addressed by adding a “refresher” sample of post-1968 immigrant families in the 1997 and 1999 waves of the survey. Prior research on child poverty persistence used earlier years of PSID data, before this immigrant refresher sample was added. The more recent timeframe of our analysis allows us to use the more representative expanded PSID sample.
- 4.
Unexpected one-time expenses can also impact a family’s ability to fund its basic needs over the short-term, though this type of situation does not impact a family’s official poverty status under the cash-income-based official U.S. definition of poverty. A major one-time expense like large medical bills from a serious illness, for example, reduces the amount of family income available to pay for housing, food, and other basic necessities. Such situations can be addressed by policies like the recently adopted Affordable Care Act (ACA), which increases the availability and affordability of quality health insurance for most U.S. residents. The impact of the ACA is yet to be seen, but this policy may be expected to reduce major out-of-pocket medical costs for many families experiencing serious injury or illness, and thus could reduce the number of families experiencing short-term periods of necessary expenses exceeding available income.
References
Aber, J. L., & Bennett, N. G. (1997). The effects of poverty on child health and development. Annual Review of Public Health, 1997, 463–483.
Anderson, R. (2011). Dynamics of economic well-being: Poverty, 2004–2006. U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P70–123. https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p70-123.pdf. Accessed 1 Apr 2011
Bane, M. J., & Ellwood, D. T. (1986). Slipping into and out of poverty: The dynamics of spells. Journal of Human Resources, 21(1), 1–23.
Ben-Shlomo, Y., & Kuh, D. (2002). A life course approach to chronic disease epidemiology: Conceptual models, empirical challenges and interdisciplinary perspectives. International Journal of Epidemiology, 31, 285–293.
Bradley, R. H., & Corwyn, R. F. (2002). Socioeconomic status and child development. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 371–399.
Braveman, P., Egerter, S., & Williams, D. (2011). The social determinants of health: Coming of age. Annual Review of Public Health, 32(3), 1–18.
Carter, M., & Barrett, C. (2006). The economics of poverty traps and persistent poverty: An asset-based approach. Journal of Development Studies, 42(2), 178–199.
Cellini, S., McKernan, S., & Ratcliffe, C. (2008). The dynamics of poverty in the United States: A review of data, methods, and findings. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 27(3), 577–605.
Chen, E., Martin, A., & Matthews, K. (2007). Trajectories of socioeconomic status across children’s lifetime predict health. Pediatrics, 120(2), e297–e303.
Corcoran, M., Duncan, G., Gurin, G., & Gurin, P. (1985). Myth and reality: The causes and persistence of poverty. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 4(4), 516–536.
Dearing, E. (2008). Psychological costs of growing up poor. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1136, 324–332.
DeNavas-Walt, C., Proctor, B., Smith, J. (2013). Income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States: 2012. U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60–245. http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p60-245.pdf. Accessed 30 Apr 2014
Duncan, G. (1984). Years of poverty, years of plenty. Ann Arbor: Survey Research Center, University of Michigan.
Duncan, G., & Rodgers, W. (1988). Longitudinal aspects of childhood poverty. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 50(4), 1007–1021.
Duncan, G., & Rodgers, W. (1991). Has children’s poverty become more persistent? American Sociological Review, 56(4), 538–550.
Duncan, G., Brooks-Gunn, J., & Klebanov, E. (1994). Economic deprivation and early childhood development. Child Development, 65, 296–318.
Duncan, G., Ziol-Guest, K., & Kalil, A. (2010). Early-childhood poverty and adult attainment, behavior, and health. Child Development, 81(1), 306–325.
Edwards, A. (2014). Dynamics of economic well-being: Poverty, 2009–2011. U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P70-137. https://www.census.gov/prod/2014pubs/p70-137.pdf. Accessed 30 Apr 2014
Elo, I. (2009). Social class differentials in health and mortality: Patterns and explanations in comparative perspective. Annual Review of Sociology, 35, 553–572.
Friedman, M. (1957). A theory of the consumption function. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Grieger, L. D., & Wyse, J. (2008). The growing racial divide in U.S. children’s long-term poverty at the end of the twentieth century. Research Report 08-660. Population Studies Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/pubs/pdf/rr08-660.pdf. Accessed 30 Apr 2014
Grieger, L. D., & Wyse, J. (2013). The impacts of welfare reform on federal assistance to persistently poor children. Journal of Children and Poverty, 19(2), 71–89.
Hanson, T., McLanahan, S., & Thomson, E. (1997). Economic resources, parental practices, and children’s well-being. In G. Duncan & J. Brooks-Gunn (Eds.), Consequences of growing up poor (pp. 190–238). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Hertzman, C., & Boyce, T. (2010). How experience gets under the skin to create gradients in developmental health. Annual Review of Public Health, 31, 329–347.
Hulme, D., & Shephard, A. (2003). Conceptualizing chronic poverty. World Development, 31(3), 403–423.
Hulme, D., Moore, K., & Shepherd, A. (2001). Chronic poverty: Meanings and analytic frameworks. CPRC Working Paper 2. Manchester: Institute of Development Policy and Management, Chronic Poverty Research Centre.
Islam, T. (2012). On the measurement of chronic poverty (Working paper). Green Bay: University of Wisconsin. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2126175. Accessed 7 Aug 2012
Jalan, J., & Ravallion, M. (1998). Transient poverty in post-reform rural China. Journal of Comparative Economics, 26(2), 338–357.
Korenman, S., Miller, J., & Sjaastad, J. (1995). Long-term poverty and child development in the United States: Results from the NLSY. Children and Youth Services Review, 17, 127–155.
Kuh, D., Ben-Shlomo, Y., Lynch, J., Hallqvist, J., & Power, C. (2003). Life course epidemiology. Journal of Epidemiological Community Health, 57, 778–783.
Lipton, M., & Ravallion, M. (1995). Poverty and policy. In J. Behrman & T. N. Srinivasin (Eds.), Handbook of development economics, vol. III (pp. 2551–2657). New York: Elsevier.
Lynch, J., & Davey Smith, G. (2005). A life course approach to chronic disease epidemiology. Annual Review of Public Health, 26, 1–35.
McLeod, J., & Shanahan, M. (1996). Trajectories of poverty and children’s mental health. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 37, 207–220.
McLoyd, V. (1998). Socioeconomic disadvantage and child development. American Psychologist, 53(2), 185–204.
Melchior, M., Moffitt, T. E., Milne, B. J., Poulton, R., & Caspi, A. (2007). Why do children from socioeconomically disadvantaged families suffer from poor health when they reach adulthood? A life-course study. American Journal of Epidemiology, 166, 966–974.
Morduch, J. (1994). Poverty and vulnerability. American Economic Review, 84(2), 221–225.
Pagani, L., Boulerice, B., & Tremblay, R. (1997). The influence of poverty on children’s classroom placement and behavior problems. In G. Duncan & J. Brooks-Gunn (Eds.), Consequences of growing up poor (pp. 311–339). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), public use dataset. Produced and distributed by the Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/. Accessed 1 Mar 2011
Rank, M., & Hirschl, T. (1999). The likelihood of poverty across the American adult life span. Social Work, 44(3), 201–216.
Ratcliffe, C. & McKernan, S. (2010). Childhood poverty persistence: Facts and consequences. Brief 14, Perspectives on low-income working families, urban institute. http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/412126-child-poverty-persistence.pdf?RSSFeed=UI_FamiliesandParenting.xml. 30 Apr 2014
Sandoval, D. A., Rank, M. R., & Hirschl, T. A. (2009). The increasing risk of poverty across the American life course. Demography, 46, 717–737.
Smith, J., Brooks-Gunn, J., & Klebanov, P. (1997). Consequences of living in poverty for young children’s cognitive and verbal ability and early school achievement. In G. Duncan & J. Brooks-Gunn (Eds.), Consequences of growing up poor (pp. 132–189). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Stevens, A. H. (1999). Climbing out of poverty, falling back in: Measuring the persistence of poverty over multiple spells. Journal of Human Resources, 34(3), 557–588.
UNICEF (2012). Measuring child poverty: New league tables of child poverty in the world’s rich countries. Report Card 10, UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence. http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/rc10_eng.pdf. Accessed 20 May 2014
U.S. Census Bureau (2014). Poverty thresholds 2012. https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/threshld/. Accessed 1 May 2014
Yaqub, S. (2000). Intertemporal welfare dynamics. Background Paper for Human Development Report 2001. http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2001/papers/yaqub-1.pdf Accessed 20 Mar 2011
Zill, N., Moore, K., Smith, E., Stief, T., & Coiro, M. (1995). The life circumstances and development of children in welfare families: A profile based on national survey data. In P. L. Chase-Lansdale & J. Brooks-Gunn (Eds.), Escape from poverty: What makes a difference for children? (pp. 38–59). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kimberlin, S., Berrick, J.D. (2015). Poor for How Long? Chronic Versus Transient Child Poverty in the United States. In: Fernandez, E., Zeira, A., Vecchiato, T., Canali, C. (eds) Theoretical and Empirical Insights into Child and Family Poverty. Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17506-5_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17506-5_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-17505-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-17506-5
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)