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Poverty at the Local Level: National and Small Area Poverty Estimates by Family Type for Australia in 2006

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Abstract

There is a substantial literature within Australia examining poverty rates for different family types at the national level. This study presents the first Australian estimates of poverty rates for different types of families at a local level. This paper builds upon the SpatialMSM/08B model, which fuses together data from the 2006 Australian Bureau of Statistics Census of Population and Housing and the 2002–03 and 2003–04 Surveys of Income and Housing. We examine differences in rates of income poverty for lone persons, sole parents, couples and couples with children. The results show that people living by themselves and sole parents have the highest poverty rates. In addition, there are pronounced spatial differences in the poverty rates of people living in different family situations, although the highest poverty rates for all family types tend to be in Australia’s rural areas, with poverty clusters in most of the capital cities.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted, however, that international comparisons of poverty rates using poverty lines based on median incomes do not take into account the differences in median income across countries, which may mean that some countries with relatively low poverty rates may also have relatively low incomes—and, thus, standards of living in some low poverty countries may be lower than those in some relatively high poverty countries.

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Acknowledgments

This paper was funded by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council (DP664429: Opportunity and Disadvantage: Differences in Wellbeing Among Australia's Adults and Children at a Small Area Level). The authors would like to thank our fellow Chief Investigators on this grant, Professor Fiona Stanley, Professor Bob Stimson, Professor Hal Kendig, Dr Sharon Goldfeld, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics for their input to the broader work being undertaken through this grant.

The authors would also particularly like to thank the Australian Bureau of Statistics for supplying data for this study and Robert Stimson from the University of Queensland for his advice on aggregation of Statistical Local Areas.

The authors would like also to acknowledge Rebecca Cassells, Binod Nepal and Yogi Vidyattama, who contributed to the development and the validation of the spatial weights used in this paper.

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  1. National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM), University of Canberra, 170 Haydon Drive, Bruce, ACT 2617, Australia

    Riyana Miranti, Justine McNamara, Robert Tanton & Ann Harding

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  1. Riyana Miranti
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Correspondence to Riyana Miranti.

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Miranti, R., McNamara, J., Tanton, R. et al. Poverty at the Local Level: National and Small Area Poverty Estimates by Family Type for Australia in 2006. Appl. Spatial Analysis 4, 145–171 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-010-9049-1

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