Does Lower Unemployment Reduce Poverty ?

s the link between unemployment and poverty as strong as many people think it is? Possibly not. How strong the link is depends critically on how we measure poverty. And during the past two decades, researchers have identified numerous shortcomings in the government’s official procedures for determining the extent of poverty. In this article, Bob DeFina presents empirical evidence that improved measures of poverty are less strongly related to changes in unemployment than the headcount rate.