Reconsidering the Divergence Between Elderly, Child, and Overall Poverty

This study challenges the conventional wisdom that elderly, child, and overall poverty are divergent. Comparing the official U.S. measure with the Luxembourg Income Study’s (LIS) measure, the author shows that the official measure underestimates elderly poverty by a significant amount and child poverty by a lesser amount. Both the elders and children are much more likely to be poor than the overall population. Analyses of 18 rich Western democracies show that overall and child poverty are very strongly positively correlated, whereas elderly poverty is moderately correlated with those two. Multivariate analyses show some commonalities and some differences in the sources of these three. Two measures of the welfare state significantly reduce overall, elderly, and child poverty. Whereas female labor force participation reduces all three, manufacturing employment, economic performance, and demographic variables only influence one or two of the dependent variables.