Abstract
Previous works have estimated the level of chronic poverty suffered by children using a count index, that is, the number of times a child was observed to be poor over a specified period of time. In addressing the question of which child suffers greater chronic poverty, this study looks beyond a count-based approach by paying attention to poverty measurement approaches that account for the timing, spacing and severity of poverty spells. This study is the first to document the poverty experiences of children in a developed nation using these intertemporal lifetime poverty measures. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics longitudinal dataset of the United States, I demonstrate that the count index does not account for all aspects of chronic poverty. Specifically, the evidence suggests that spending fewer periods in poverty is not always an indication of less chronic poverty suffered if the depth and distribution of poverty are ignored. I compare chronic poverty experiences between groups of children based on race, age of mother at birth, region, type of household, parental educational attainment and experiences of parental marital dissolution. Not surprisingly, non-whites suffer more chronic poverty than whites. This study shows that this difference is significantly increased when the timing and spacing of poverty spells are accounted for.
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Notes
Hoy et al. (2012) analyzed the commonalities and differences which exist between the F, BCD and HZ indices in the measurement of lifetime poverty.
Gaiha (1989) show that chronically poor persons (i.e., persons who spend all periods poor) are not necessarily the poorest, i.e., those with wider poverty gaps.
Hoy and Zheng (2011)’s measure has an additional component which involves the level of poverty suffered by an individual over his/her lifetime, where the average income over an entire period is compared with a corresponding poverty line. One can choose the weight on this term to be zero which is what this study adopts.
After the year 1997, PSID interviews are conducted every two years. PSID investigators in a technical paper, Andreski et al. (2008) caution researchers about the use of income data from two years ago collected in their biennial interviews. Beginning 2003, PSID stopped asking respondents about incomes from two years ago due to great recalling error. Hence, data after 1997 are not included in this study.
Other causes of household switches found in the data include death of parent(s) and/or move-ins with a relative. I focus on parental divorces because it constitutes about 95% of the disruptions in the initial household environment of children.
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Appendix
HZ weight functions for different values of the sensitivity parameter δ
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Asiamah, H.A. Childhood Chronic Poverty Estimations: Looking Beyond a Count Index. Child Ind Res 14, 185–215 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-020-09764-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-020-09764-2