The articles in this issue examine changing poverty and changing antipoverty policies in the United States since the early 1970s. The authors consider both how economic and demographic changes have changed which individuals and families are poor, and how antipoverty programs and policies have, and have not, changed in response. Poverty rates have declined for some demographic groups and increas...

The conference papers, along with the discussants' remarks and an introductory essay by Robert Haveman, have now appeared in A Decade of Federal Antipoverty Programs: Achievements, Failures, add Lessons-a volume edited by Haveman, Director of the lnstitute at the time of the Wingspread conference. This is the second volume in the Institute's Poverty Policy Analysis Series of books written for r...

surance policies aimed atalleviating poverty. Fifty years later, many of these programs and policies—or variations of them—are still in effect. Primarily using data from literature, this paper analyzes the effectiveness of antipoverty programs over the last half-century.We find that social insurance programs have had much stronger effects on reducing poverty rates than have social assistance pr...

macroeconomic policies kept the economy growing, then real wages would continue to increase steadily for workers throughout the wage distribution. The additional resources being devoted to the new antipoverty initiatives would further contribute to poverty reduction, for example, by raising the skills and employment of those who had been left behind by economic growth. Employment and training p...

This paper reviews changes in the federal government's approach to antipoverty policy, analyzes the trend in child poverty and the antipoverty impacts of current income maintenance programs, and proposes some additional antipoverty policies. No single program or policy can meet the needs of the diverse poverty population. There is now greater variation in economic status among children and amon...

M ost examinations of U.S. domestic antipoverty policy are inherently parochial, for they are based on the experiences of only our nation in isolation from the others. However, cross-national comparisons can also teach lessons about antipoverty policy. While all nations value low poverty, high levels of economic self-reliance and equality of opportunity for younger persons, they differ dramatic...

Despite remarkable achievements in fighting poverty in the past three decades, numerous challenges remain for the People’s Republic of China. The country’s antipoverty efforts are in a key phase of strategic reorientation. This paper analyzes lessons learned from poverty reduction programs in the country and identifies key areas to be addressed in the next decade. The paper proposes seven polic...

Since the early 1970s, dramatic changes in the economy, demographic composition of the population and in public policies have combined to reduce the antipoverty effects of economic growth. Because economic growth is now necessary, but not sufficient, to significantly reduce poverty, antipoverty policies must be expanded and reformed, especially in the aftermath of the severe recession that bega...

Evidence from a diverse set of experiments now illustrates some of the conditions under which policy-induced increases in employment among low-income and mostly single parents can help or hurt young children’s achievement. This article summarizes the results of research conducted as part of the Next Generation Project, a collaborative effort involving researchers at MDRC and several universitie...