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The Social Consequences of Poverty: An Empirical Test on Longitudinal Data

Carina mood.

Institute for Futures Studies, Box 591, 101 31 Stockholm, Sweden

Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

Jan O. Jonsson

Nuffield College, OX1 1NF Oxford, England, UK

Poverty is commonly defined as a lack of economic resources that has negative social consequences, but surprisingly little is known about the importance of economic hardship for social outcomes. This article offers an empirical investigation into this issue. We apply panel data methods on longitudinal data from the Swedish Level-of-Living Survey 2000 and 2010 (n = 3089) to study whether poverty affects four social outcomes—close social relations (social support), other social relations (friends and relatives), political participation, and activity in organizations. We also compare these effects across five different poverty indicators. Our main conclusion is that poverty in general has negative effects on social life. It has more harmful effects for relations with friends and relatives than for social support; and more for political participation than organizational activity. The poverty indicator that shows the greatest impact is material deprivation (lack of cash margin), while the most prevalent poverty indicators—absolute income poverty, and especially relative income poverty—appear to have the least effect on social outcomes.

Introduction

According to the most influential definitions, poverty is seen as a lack of economic resources that have negative social consequences—this is in fact a view that dominates current theories of poverty (Townsend 1979 ; Sen 1983 ; UN 1995 ), and also has a long heritage (Smith 1776 /1976). The idea is that even when people have food, clothes, and shelter, economic problems lead to a deterioration of social relations and participation. Being poor is about not being able to partake in society on equal terms with others, and therefore in the long run being excluded by fellow citizens or withdrawing from social and civic life because of a lack of economic resources, typically in combination with the concomitant shame of not being able to live a life like them (e.g., Sen 1983 ). Economic hardship affects the standard of life, consumption patterns, and leisure time activities, and this is directly or indirectly related to the possibility of making or maintaining friends or acquaintances: poverty is revealed by not having appropriate clothes, or a car; by not being able to afford vacation trips, visits to the restaurant, or hosting dinner parties (e.g., Mack and Lansley 1985 ; Callan et al. 1993 )—in short, low incomes prevent the poor from living a life in “decency” (Galbraith 1958 ).

The relational nature of poverty is also central to the social exclusion literature, which puts poverty in a larger perspective of multiple disadvantages and their interrelationships (Hills et al. 2002 , Rodgers et al. 1995 ; Room 1995 ). While there are different definitions of the social exclusion concept, the literature is characterized by a move from distributional to relational concerns (Gore 1995 ) and by an emphasis on the importance of social integration and active participation in public life. The inability of living a decent or “ordinary” social life may in this perspective erode social networks, social relations, and social participation, potentially setting off a downward spiral of misfortune (Paugam 1995 ) reinforcing disadvantages in several domains of life. This perspective on poverty and social exclusion is essentially sociological: the playing field of the private economy is social. It is ultimately about individuals’ relations with other people—not only primary social relations, with kin and friends, but extending to secondary relations reflected by participation in the wider community, such as in organizations and in political life (UN 1995 ).

Despite the fact that the social consequences of limited economic resources are central to modern perspectives on poverty and marginalization, this relation is surprisingly seldom studied empirically. Qualitative research on the poor give interesting examples on how the negative effects of poverty works, and portray the way that economic problems are transformed into social ones (Ridge and Millar 2011 ; Attree 2006 ). Such studies, however, have too small sample sizes to generalize to the population, and they cannot tell us much about the range of the problem. The (relatively few) studies that have addressed the association between poverty and social outcomes on larger scale tend to verify that the poor have worse social relations (Böhnke 2008 ; Jonsson and Östberg 2004 ; Levitas 2006 ), but Barnes et al. ( 2002 ) did not find any noteworthy association between poverty (measured as relative income poverty, using the 60 %-limit) and social relations or social isolation. Dahl et al. ( 2008 ) found no relation between poverty and friendships, but report less participation in civic organizations among the poor. All these studies have however been limited to cross-sectional data or hampered by methodological shortcomings, and therefore have not been able to address the separation of selection effects from potentially causal ones.

Our aim in this study is to make good these omissions. We use longitudinal data from the Swedish Level of Living Surveys (LNU) 2000 and 2010 to study how falling into poverty, or rising from it, is associated with outcomes in terms of primary and secondary social relations, including participation in civil society. These panel data make it possible to generalize the results to the Swedish adult population (19–65 in 2000; 29–75 in 2010), to address the issue of causality, and to estimate how strong the relation between economic vulnerability and social outcomes is. Because the data provide us with the possibility of measuring poverty in several ways, we are also able to address the question using different—alternative or complementary—indicators. Poverty is measured as economic deprivation (lack of cash margin, self-reported economic problems), income poverty (absolute and relative), and long-term poverty, respectively. The primary, or core, social outcomes are indicated by having social support if needed, and by social relations with friends and relatives. We expand our analysis to secondary, or fringe, social outcomes in terms of participation in social life at large, such as in civil society: our indicators here include the participation in organizations and in political life.

Different Dimensions/Definitions of Poverty

In modern welfare states, the normal take on the issue of poverty is to regard it as the relative lack of economic resources, that is, to define the poor in relation to their fellow citizens in the same country at the same time. Three approaches dominate the scholarly literature today. The first takes as a point of departure the income deemed necessary for living a life on par with others, or that makes possible an “acceptable” living standard—defined as the goods and services judged necessary, often on the basis of consumer or household budget studies. This usage of a poverty threshold is often (somewhat confusingly) called absolute income poverty , and is most common in North America (cf. Corak 2006 for a review), although most countries have poverty lines defined for different kinds of social benefits. In Europe and in the OECD, the convention is instead to use versions of relative income poverty , defining as poor those whose incomes fall well behind the median income in the country in question (European Union using 60 % and OECD 50 % of the median as the threshold). As an alternative to using purchasing power (as in the “absolute” measure), this relative measure defines poverty by income inequality in the bottom half of the income distribution (Atkinson et al. 2002 ; OECD 2008 ).

The third approach argues that income measures are too indirect; poverty should instead be indicated directly by the lack of consumer products and services that are necessary for an acceptable living standard (Mack and Lansley 1985 ; Ringen 1988 ; Townsend 1979 ). This approach often involves listing a number of possessions and conditions, such as having a car, washing machine, modern kitchen; and being able to dine out sometimes, to have the home adequately heated and mended, to have sufficient insurances, and so on. An elaborate version includes information on what people in general see as necessities, what is often termed “consensual” poverty (e.g., Mack and Lansley 1985 ; Gordon et al. 2000 ; Halleröd 1995 ; van den Bosch 2001 ). Other direct indicators include the ability to cover unforeseen costs (cash margin) and subjective definitions of poverty (e.g., van den Bosch 2001 ). The direct approach to poverty has gained in popularity and measures of economic/material deprivation and consensual poverty are used in several recent and contemporary comparative surveys such as ECHP (Whelan et al. 2003 ) and EU-SILC (e.g., UNICEF 2012 ; Nolan and Whelan 2011 ).

It is often pointed out that, due to the often quite volatile income careers of households, the majority of poverty episodes are short term and the group that is identified as poor in the cross-section therefore tends to be rather diluted (Bane and Ellwood 1986 ; Duncan et al. 1993 ). Those who suffer most from the downsides of poverty are, it could be argued, instead the long-term, persistent, or chronically poor, and there is empirical evidence that those who experience more years in poverty also are more deprived of a “common lifestyle” (Whelan et al. 2003 ). Poverty persistence has been defined in several ways, such as having spent a given number of years below a poverty threshold, or having an average income over a number of years that falls under the poverty line (e.g., Duncan and Rodgers 1991 ; Rodgers and Rodgers 1993 ). The persistently poor can only be detected with any precision in longitudinal studies, and typically on the basis of low incomes, as data covering repeated measures of material deprivation are uncommon.

For the purposes of this study, it is not essential to nominate the best or most appropriate poverty measure. The measures outlined above, while each having some disadvantage, all provide plausible theoretical grounds for predicting negative social outcomes. Low incomes, either in “absolute” or relative terms, may inhibit social activities and participation because these are costly (e.g., having decent housing, needing a car, paying membership fees, entrance tickets, or new clothes). Economic deprivation, often indicated by items or habits that are directly relevant to social life, is also a valid representation of a lack of resources. Lastly, to be in long-term poverty is no doubt a worse condition than being in shorter-term poverty.

It is worth underlining that we see different measures of poverty as relevant indicators despite the fact that the overlap between them often is surprisingly small (Bradshaw and Finch 2003 ). The lack of overlap is not necessarily a problem, as different people may have different configurations of economic problems but share in common many of the experiences of poverty—experiences, we argue, that are (in theory at least) all likely to lead to adverse social outcomes. Whether this is the case or not is one of the questions that we address, but if previous studies on child poverty are of any guidance, different definitions of poverty may show surprisingly similar associations with a number of outcomes (Jonsson and Östberg 2004 ).

What are the Likely Social Consequences of Poverty?

We have concluded that poverty is, according to most influential poverty definitions, manifested in the social sphere. This connects with the idea of Veblen ( 1899 ) of the relation between consumption and social status. What you buy and consume—clothes, furniture, vacation trips—in part define who you are, which group you aspire to belong to, and what view others will have of you. Inclusion into and exclusion from status groups and social circles are, in this view, dependent on economic resources as reflected in consumption patterns. While Veblen was mostly concerned about the rich and their conspicuous consumption, it is not difficult to transfer these ideas to the less fortunate: the poor are under risk of exclusion, of losing their social status and identity, and perhaps also, therefore, their friends. It is however likely that this is a process that differs according to outcome, with an unknown time-lag.

If, as outlined above, we can speak of primary and secondary social consequences, the former should include socializing with friends, but also more intimate relations. Our conjecture is that the closer the relation, the less affected is it by poverty, simply because intimate social bonds are characterized by more unconditional personal relations, typically not requiring costs to uphold.

When it comes to the secondary social consequences, we move outside the realm of closer interpersonal relations to acquaintances and the wider social network, and to the (sometimes relatively anonymous) participation in civil or political life. This dimension of poverty lies at the heart of the social exclusion perspective, which strongly emphasizes the broader issues of societal participation and civic engagement, vital to democratic societies. It is also reflected in the United Nation’s definition, following the Copenhagen summit in 1995, where “overall poverty” in addition to lack of economic resources is said to be “…characterized by lack of participation in decision-making and in civil, social, and cultural life” (UN 1995 , p. 57). Poverty may bring about secondary social consequences because such participation is costly—as in the examples of travel, need for special equipment, or membership fees—but also because of psychological mechanisms, such as lowered self-esteem triggering disbelief in civic and political activities, and a general passivity leading to decreased organizational and social activities overall. If processes like these exist there is a risk of a “downward spiral of social exclusion” where unemployment leads to poverty and social isolation, which in turn reduce the chances of re-gaining a footing in the labour market (Paugam 1995 ).

What theories of poverty and social exclusion postulate is, in conclusion, that both what we have called primary and secondary social relations will be negatively affected by economic hardship—the latter supposedly more than the former. Our strategy in the following is to test this basic hypothesis by applying multivariate panel-data analyses on longitudinal data. In this way, we believe that we can come further than previous studies towards estimating causal effects, although, as is the case in social sciences, the causal relation must remain preliminary due to the nature of observational data.

Data and Definitions

We use the two most recent waves of the Swedish Level-of-living Survey, conducted in 2000 and 2010 on random (1/1000) samples of adult Swedes, aged 18–75. 1 The attrition rate is low, with 84 % of panel respondents remaining from 2000 to 2010. This is one of the few data sets from which we can get over-time measures of both poverty and social outcomes for a panel that is representative of the adult population (at the first time point, t 0 )—in addition, there is annual income information from register data between the waves. The panel feature obviously restricts the age-groups slightly (ages 19–65 in 2000; 29–75 in 2010), the final number of analyzed cases being between 2995 and 3144, depending on the number of missing cases on the respective poverty measure and social outcome variable. For ease of interpretation and comparison of effect sizes, we have constructed all social outcome variables and poverty variables to be dichotomous (0/1). 2

In constructing poverty variables, we must balance theoretical validity with the need to have group sizes large enough for statistical analysis. For example, we expand the absolute poverty measure to include those who received social assistance any time during the year. As social assistance recipients receive this benefit based on having an income below a poverty line that is similar to the one we use, this seems justifiable. In other cases, however, group sizes are small but we find no theoretically reasonable way of making the variables more inclusive, meaning that some analyses cannot be carried out in full detail.

Our income poverty measures are based on register data and are thus free from recall error or misreporting, but—as the proponents of deprivation measures point out—income poverty measures are indirect measures of hardship. The deprivation measure is more direct, but self-reporting always carries a risk of subjectivity in the assessment. To the extent that changes in one’s judgment of the economic situation depend on changes in non-economic factors that are also related to social relations, the deprivation measure will give upwardly biased estimates. 3 As there is no general agreement about whether income or deprivation definitions are superior, our use of several definitions is a strength because the results will give an overall picture that is not sensitive to potential limitations in any one measure. In addition, we are able to see whether results vary systematically across commonly used definitions.

Poverty Measures

  • Cash margin whether the respondent can raise a given sum of money in a week, if necessary (in 2000, the sum was 12,000 SEK; in 2010, 14,000 SEK, the latter sum corresponding to approximately 1600 Euro, 2200 USD, or 1400 GBP in 2013 currency rates). For those who answer in the affirmative, there is a follow-up question of how this can be done: by (a) own/household resources, (b) borrowing.
  • Economic crisis Those who claim that they have had problems meeting costs for rent, food, bills, etc. during the last 12 months (responded “yes” to a yes/no alternative).
  • Absolute poverty is defined as either (a) having a disposable family income below a poverty threshold or (b) receiving social assistance, both assessed in 1999 (for the survey 2000) or 2009 (for the survey 2010). The poverty line varies by family type/composition according to a commonly used calculation of household necessities (Jansson 2000 ). This “basket” of goods and services is intended to define an acceptable living standard, and was originally constructed for calculating an income threshold for social assistance, with addition of estimated costs for housing and transport. The threshold is adjusted for changes in the Consumer Price Index, using 2010 as the base year. In order to get analyzable group sizes, we classify anyone with an income below 1.25 times this threshold as poor. Self-employed are excluded because their nominal incomes are often a poor indicator of their economic standard.
  • Deprived and income poor A combination of the indicator of economic deprivation and the indicator of absolute poverty. The poor are defined as those who are economically deprived and in addition are either absolute income-poor or have had social assistance some time during the last calendar year.
  • Long - term poor are defined as those interviewed in 2010 (2000) who had an equivalized disposable income that fell below the 1.25 absolute poverty threshold (excluding self-employed) or who received social assistance in 2009 (1999), and who were in this situation for at least two of the years 2000–2008 (1990–1998). The long-term poor (coded 1) are contrasted to the non-poor (coded 0), excluding the short-term poor (coded missing) in order to distinguish whether long-term poverty is particularly detrimental (as compared to absolute poverty in general).
  • Relative poverty is defined, according to the EU standard, as having a disposable equivalized income that is lower than 60 % of the median income in Sweden the year in question (EU 2005). 4 As for absolute poverty, this variable is based on incomes the year prior to the survey year. Self-employed are excluded.

Social and Participation Outcomes

Primary (core) social relations.

  • Social support The value 1 (has support) is given to those who have answered in the positive to three questions about whether one has a close friend who can help if one (a) gets sick, (b) needs someone to talk to about troubles, or (c) needs company. Those who lack support in at least one of these respects are coded 0 (lack of support).
  • Frequent social relations This variable is based on four questions about how often one meets (a) relatives and (b) friends, either (i) at ones’ home or (ii) at the home of those one meets, with the response set being “yes, often”, “sometimes”, and “no, never”. Respondents are defined as having frequent relations (1) if they have at least one “often” of the four possible and no “never”, 5 and 0 otherwise.

Secondary (fringe) Social Relations/Participation

  • Political participation : Coded 1 (yes) if one during the last 12 months actively participated (held an elected position or was at a meeting) in a trade union or a political party, and 0 (no) otherwise. 6
  • Organizational activity : Coded 1 (yes) if one is a member of an organization and actively participate in its activities at least once in a year, and 0 (no) otherwise.

Control Variables

  • Age (in years)
  • Educational qualifications in 2010 (five levels according to a standard schema used by Statistics Sweden (1985), entered as dummy variables)
  • Civil status distinguishes between single and cohabiting/married persons, and is used as a time-varying covariate (TVC) where we register any changes from couple to single and vice versa.
  • Immigrant origin is coded 1 if both parents were born in any country outside Sweden, 0 otherwise.
  • Labour market status is also used as a TVC, with four values indicating labour market participation (yes/no) in 2000 and 2010, respectively.
  • Global self - rated health in 2000, with three response alternatives: Good, bad, or in between. 7

Table  1 shows descriptive statistics for the 2 years we study, 2000 and 2010 (percentages in the upper panel; averages, standard deviations, max and min values in the lower panel). Recall that the sample is longitudinal with the same respondents appearing in both years. This means, naturally, that the sample ages 10 years between the waves, the upper age limit being pushed up from 65 to 75. Both the change over years and the ageing of the sample have repercussions for their conditions: somewhat more have poor health, for example, fewer lack social support but more lack frequent social relations, and more are single in 2010 (where widows are a growing category). The group has however improved their economic conditions, with a sizeable reduction in poverty rates. Most of the changes are in fact period effects, and it is particularly obvious for the change in poverty—in 2000 people still suffered from the deep recession in Sweden that begun in 1991 and started to turn in 1996/97 (Jonsson et al. 2010 ), while the most recent international recession (starting in 2008/09) did not affect Sweden that much.

Table 1

Descriptive statistics of dependent and independent variables in the LNU panel

N for variables used as change variables pertains to non-missing observations in both 2000 and 2010

The overall decrease in poverty masks changes that our respondents experienced between 2000 and 2010: Table  2 reveals these for the measure of economic deprivation, showing the outflow (row) percentages and the total percentages (and the number of respondents in parentheses). It is evident that there was quite a lot of mobility out of poverty between the years (61 % left), but also a very strong relative risk of being found in poverty in 2010 among those who were poor in 2000 (39 vs. 5 % of those who were non-poor in 2000). Of all our respondents, the most common situation was to be non-poor both years (81 %), while few were poor on both occasions (6 %). Table  2 also demonstrates some small cell numbers: 13.3 % of the panel (9.4 % + 3.9 %), or a good 400 cases, changed poverty status, and these cases are crucial for identifying our models. As in many panel studies based on survey data, this will inevitably lead to some problems with large standard errors and difficulties in arriving at statistically significant and precise estimates; but to preview the findings, our results are surprisingly consistent all the same.

Table 2

Mobility in poverty (measured as economic deprivation) in Sweden between 2000 and 2010

Outflow percentage (row %), total percentage, and number of cases (in parentheses). LNU panel 2000–2010

We begin with showing descriptive results of how poverty is associated with our outcome variables, using the economic deprivation measure of poverty. 8 Figure  1 confirms that those who are poor have worse social relationships and participate less in political life and in organizations. Poverty is thus connected with both primary and secondary social relations.

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The relation between poverty (measured as economic deprivation) and social relations/participation in Sweden, LNU 2010. N = 5271

The descriptive picture in Fig.  1 does not tell us anything about the causal nature of the relation between poverty and social outcomes, only that such a relation exists, and that it is in the predicted direction: poor people have weaker social relations, less support, and lower levels of political and civic participation. Our task now is to apply more stringent statistical models to test whether the relation we have uncovered is likely to be of a causal nature. This means that we must try to rid the association of both the risk for reverse causality—that, for example, a weaker social network leads to poverty—and the risk that there is a common underlying cause of both poverty and social outcomes, such as poor health or singlehood.

The Change Model

First, as we have panel data, we can study the difference in change across two time-points T (called t 0 and t 1 , respectively) in an outcome variable (e.g., social relations), between groups (i.e. those who changed poverty status versus those who did not). The respondents are assigned to either of these groups on the grounds of entering or leaving poverty; in the first case, one group is non-poor at t 0 but experiences poverty at t 1 , and the change in this group is compared to the group consisting of those who are non-poor both at t 0 and t 1 . The question in focus then is: Do social relations in the group entering poverty worsen in relation to the corresponding change in social relations in the group who remains non-poor? Because we have symmetric hypotheses of the effect of poverty on social outcomes—assuming leaving poverty has positive consequences similar to the negative consequences of entering poverty—we also study whether those who exit poverty improve their social outcomes as compared to those remaining poor. We ask, that is, not only what damage falling into poverty might have for social outcomes, but also what “social gains” could be expected for someone who climbs out of poverty.

Thus, in our analyses we use two different “change groups”, poverty leavers and poverty entrants , and two “comparison groups”, constantly poor and never poor , respectively. 9 The setup comparing the change in social outcomes for those who change poverty status and those who do not is analogous to a so-called difference-in-difference design, but as the allocation of respondents to comparison groups and change groups in our data cannot be assumed to be random (as with control groups and treatment groups in experimental designs), we take further measures to approach causal interpretations.

Accounting for the Starting Value of the Dependent Variable

An important indication of the non-randomness of the allocation to the change and comparison groups is that their average values of the social outcomes (i.e. the dependent variable) at t 0 differ systematically: Those who become poor between 2000 and 2010 have on average worse social outcomes already in 2000 than those who stay out of poverty. Similarly, those who stay in poverty both years have on average worse social outcomes than those who have exited poverty in 2010. In order to further reduce the impact of unobserved variables, we therefore make all comparisons of changes in social outcomes between t 0 and t 1 for fixed t 0 values of both social outcome and poverty status.

As we use dichotomous outcome variables, we get eight combinations of poverty and outcome states (2 × 2 × 2 = 8), and four direct strategic comparisons:

  • Poverty leavers versus constantly poor, positive social outcome in 2000 , showing if those who exit poverty have a higher chance of maintaining the positive social outcome than those who stay in poverty
  • Poverty leavers versus constantly poor, negative social outcome in 2000 , showing if those who exit poverty have a higher chance of improvement in the social outcome than those who stay in poverty
  • Poverty entrants versus never poor, positive social outcome in 2000 , showing if those who enter poverty have a higher risk of deterioration in the social outcome than those who stay out of poverty, and
  • Poverty entrants versus never poor, negative social outcome in 2000 , showing if those who enter poverty have a lower chance of improvement in the social outcome.

Thus, we hold the initial social situation and poverty status fixed, letting only the poverty in 2010 vary. 10 The analytical strategy is set out in Table  3 , showing estimates of the probability to have frequent social relations in 2010, for poverty defined (as in Table  2 and Fig.  1 above) as economic deprivation.

Table 3

Per cent with frequent social relations in “comparison” and “change” groups in 2000 and 2010, according to initial value on social relations in 2000 and poverty (measured as economic deprivation) in 2000 and 2010

LNU panel 2000–2010. N = 3083

The figures in Table  3 should be read like this: 0.59 in the upper left cell means that among those who were poor neither in 2000 nor in 2010 (“never poor”, or 0–0), and who had non-frequent social relations to begin with, 59 % had frequent social relations in 2010. Among those never poor who instead started out with more frequent social relations, 90 per cent had frequent social relations in 2010. This difference (59 vs. 90) tells us either that the initial conditions were important (weak social relations can be inherently difficult to improve) or that there is heterogeneity within the group of never poor people, such as some having (to us perhaps unobserved) characteristics that support relation building while others have not.

Because our strategy is to condition on the initial situation in order to minimize the impact of initial conditions and unobserved heterogeneity, we focus on the comparisons across columns. If we follow each column downwards, that is, for a given initial social outcome (weak or not weak social relations, respectively) it is apparent that the outcome is worse for the “poverty entrants” in comparison with the “never poor” (upper three lines). Comparing the change group [those who became poor (0–1)] with the comparison group [never poor (0–0)] for those who started out with weak social relations (left column), the estimated probability of frequent social relations in 2010 is 7 % points lower for those who became poor. Among those who started out with frequent relations, those who became poor have a 17 % points lower probability of frequent relations in 2010 than those who stayed out of poverty.

If we move down Table  3 , to the three bottom lines, the change and comparison groups are now different. The comparison group is the “constantly poor” (1–1), and the change group are “poverty leavers” (1–0). Again following the columns downwards, we can see that the change group improved their social relations in comparison with the constantly poor; and this is true whether they started out with weak social relations or not. In fact, the chance of improvement for those who started off with non-frequent social relations is the most noteworthy, being 33 % units higher for those who escaped poverty than for those who did not. In sum, Table  3 suggests that becoming poor appears to be bad for social relations whereas escaping poverty is beneficial.

Expanding the Model

The model exemplified in Table  3 is a panel model that studies change across time within the same individuals, conditioning on their initial state. It does away with time-constant effects of observed and unobserved respondent characteristics, and although this is far superior to a cross-sectional model (such as the one underlying Fig.  1 ) there are still threats to causal interpretations. It is possible (if probably unusual) that permanent characteristics may trigger a change over time in both the dependent and independent variables; or, put in another way, whether a person stays in or exits poverty may be partly caused by a variable that also predicts change in the outcome (what is sometimes referred to as a violation of the “common trend assumption”). In our case, we can for example imagine that health problems in 2000 can affect who becomes poor in 2010, at t 1 , and that the same health problems can lead to a deterioration of social relations between 2000 and 2010, so even conditioning on the social relations at t 0 will not be enough. This we handle by adding control variables, attempting to condition the comparison of poor and non-poor also on sex, age, highest level of education (in 2010), immigrant status, and health (in 2000). 11

Given the set-up of our data—with 10 years between the two data-points and with no information on the precise time ordering of poverty and social outcomes at t 1 , the model can be further improved by including change in some of the control variables. It is possible, for example, that a non-poor and married respondent in 2000 divorced before 2010, triggering both poverty and reduced social relations at the time of the interview in 2010. 12 There are two major events that in this way may bias our results, divorce/separation and unemployment (because each can lead to poverty, and possibly also affect social outcomes). We handle this by controlling for variables combining civil status and unemployment in 2000 as well as in 2010. To the extent that these factors are a consequence of becoming poor, there is a risk of biasing our estimates downwards (e.g., if becoming poor increases the risk of divorce). However, as there is no way to distinguish empirically whether control variables (divorce, unemployment) or poverty changed first we prefer to report conservative estimates. 13

Throughout, we use logistic regression to estimate our models (one model for each social outcome and poverty definition). We create a dummy variable for each of the combinations of poverty in 2000, poverty in 2010 and the social outcome in 2000, and alternate the reference category in order to get the four strategic comparisons described above. Coefficients do thus express the distance between the relevant change and comparison groups. The coefficients reported are average marginal effects (AME) for a one-unit change in the respective poverty variable (i.e. going from non-poor to poor and vice versa), which are straightforwardly interpretable as percentage unit differences and (unlike odds ratios or log odds ratios) comparable across models and outcomes (Mood 2010 ).

Regression Results

As detailed above, we use changes over time in poverty and social outcomes to estimate the effects of interest. The effect of poverty is allowed to be heterogeneous, and is assessed through four comparisons of the social outcome in 2010 (Y 1 ):

  • Those entering poverty relative to those in constant non-poverty (P 01  = 0,1 vs. P 01  = 0,0) when both have favourable social outcomes at t 0 (Y 0  = 1)
  • Those exiting poverty relative to those in constant poverty (P 01  = 1,0 vs. P 01  = 1,1) when both have favourable social outcomes at t 0 (Y 0  = 1)
  • Those entering poverty relative to those in constant non-poverty (P 01  = 0,1 vs. P 01  = 0,0) when both have non-favourable social outcomes at t 0 (Y 0  = 0)
  • Those exiting poverty relative to those in constant poverty (P 01  = 1,0 vs. P 01  = 1,1) when both have non-favourable social outcomes at t 0 (Y 0  = 0)

Poverty is a rare outcome, and as noted above it is particularly uncommon to enter poverty between 2000 and 2010 because of the improving macro-economic situation. Some of the social outcomes were also rare in 2000. This unfortunately means that in some comparisons we have cell frequencies that are prohibitively small, and we have chosen to exclude all comparisons involving cells where N < 20.

The regression results are displayed in Table  4 . To understand how the estimates come to be, consider the four in the upper left part of the Table (0.330, 0.138, −0.175 and −0.065), reflecting the effect of poverty, measured as economic deprivation, on the probability of having frequent social relations. Because these estimates are all derived from a regression without any controls, they are identical (apart from using three decimal places) to the percentage comparisons in Table  3 (0.33, 0.14, −0.17, −0.07), and can be straightforwardly interpreted as average differences in the probability of the outcome in question. From Table  4 it is clear that the three first differences are all statistically significant, whereas the estimate −0.07 is not (primarily because those who entered poverty in 2010 and had infrequent social relations in 2000 is a small group, N = 25).

Table 4

Average marginal effects (from logistic regression) of five types of poverty (1–5) on four social outcomes (A-D) comparing those with different poverty statuses in 2000 and 2010 and conditioning on the starting value of the social outcome (in 2000)

Right columns control for sex, education, age, immigrant status, health in 2000, civil status change between 2000 and 2010, and unemployment change between 2000 and 2010. P values in parentheses. Excluded estimates involve variable categories with N < 20. Shaded cells are in hypothesized direction, bold estimates are statistically significant ( P  < 0.05). N in regressions: 1A: 3075; 1B: 3073; 1C: 3075; 1D: 3069; 2A: 3144; 2B: 3137; 2C: 3144; 2D: 3130; 3A: 3074, 3B: 3072; 3C: 3074; 3D: 3068; 4A: 2995; 4B: 2988; 4C: 2995; 4D: 2981; 5A: 3128; 5B: 3121; 5C: 3128; 5D: 3114

In the column to the right, we can see what difference the controls make: the estimates are reduced, but not substantially so, and the three first differences are still statistically significant.

The estimates for each social outcome, reflecting the four comparisons described above, support the hypothesis of poverty affecting social relations negatively (note that the signs of the estimates should differ in order to do so, the upper two being positive as they reflect an effect of the exit from poverty, and the lower two being negative as they reflect an effect of entering poverty). We have indicated support for the hypothesis in Table  4 by shading the estimates and standard errors for estimates that go in the predicted direction.

Following the first two columns down, we can see that there is mostly support for the hypothesis of a negative effect of poverty, but when controlling for other variables, the effects on social support are not impressive. In fact, if we concentrate on each social outcome (i.e., row-wise), one conclusion is that, when controlling for confounders, there are rather small effects of poverty on the probability of having access to social support. The opposite is true for political participation, where the consistency in the estimated effects of poverty is striking.

If we instead follow the columns, we ask whether any of the definitions of poverty is a better predictor of social outcomes than the others. The measure of economic deprivation appears to be the most stable one, followed by absolute poverty and the combined deprivation/absolute poverty variable. 14 The relative poverty measure is less able to predict social outcomes: in many instances it even has the non-expected sign. Interestingly, long-term poverty (as measured here) does not appear to have more severe negative consequences than absolute poverty in general.

Because some of our comparison groups are small, it is difficult to get high precision in the estimates, efficiency being a concern particularly in view of the set of control variables in Table  4 . Only 14 out of 62 estimates in models with controls are significant and in the right direction. Nonetheless, with 52 out of 62 estimates in these models having the expected sign, we believe that the hypothesis of a negative effect of poverty on social outcomes receives quite strong support.

Although control variables are not shown in the table, one thing should be noted about them: The reduction of coefficients when including control variables is almost exclusively driven by changes in civil status. 15 The time constant characteristics that are included are cross-sectionally related to both poverty and social outcomes, but they have only minor impacts on the estimated effects of poverty. This suggests that the conditioning on prior values of the dependent and independent variables eliminates much time invariant heterogeneity, which increases the credibility of estimates.

Conclusions

We set out to test a fundamental, but rarely questioned assumption in dominating definitions of poverty: whether shortage of economic resources has negative consequences for social relations and participation. By using longitudinal data from the Swedish Level-of-living Surveys 2000 and 2010, including repeated measures of poverty (according to several commonly used definitions) and four social outcome variables, we are able to come further than previous studies in estimating the relation between poverty and social outcomes: Our main conclusion is that there appears to be a causal relation between them.

Panel models suggest that falling into poverty increases the risk of weakening social relations and decreasing (civic and political) participation. Climbing out of poverty tends to have the opposite effects, a result that strengthens the interpretation of causality. The sample is too small to estimate the effect sizes with any precision, yet they appear to be substantial, with statistically significant estimates ranging between 5 and 21 % units.

While these findings are disquieting insofar as poverty goes, our results also suggest two more positive results. First, the negative effects of poverty appear to be reversible: once the private economy recovers, social outcomes improve. Secondly, the negative consequences are less for the closest social relations, whether there is someone there in cases of need (sickness, personal problems, etc.). This is in line with an interpretation of such close relations being unconditional: our nearest and dearest tend to hang on to us also in times of financial troubles, which may bolster risks for social isolation and psychological ill-being,

Our finding of negative effects of poverty on civic and political participation relates to the fears of a “downward spiral of social exclusion”, as there is a risk that the loss of less intimate social relations shrinks social networks and decreases the available social capital in terms of contacts that can be important for outcomes such as finding a job (e.g., Lin 2001 ; Granovetter 1974 ). However, Gallie et al. ( 2003 ) found no evidence for any strong impact of social isolation on unemployment, suggesting that the negative effects on social outcomes that we observe are unlikely to lead to self-reinforcement of poverty. Nevertheless, social relations are of course important outcomes in their own right, so if they are negatively affected by poverty it matters regardless of whether social relations in turn are important for other outcomes. Effects on political and civic participation are also relevant in themselves beyond individuals’ wellbeing, as they suggest a potentially democratic problem where poor have less of a voice and less influence on society than others.

Our results show the merits of our approach, to study the relation between poverty and social outcomes longitudinally. The fact that the poor have worse social relations and lower participation is partly because of selection. This may be because the socially isolated, or those with a weaker social network, more easily fall into poverty; or it can be because of a common denominator, such as poor health or social problems. But once we have stripped the analysis of such selection effects, we also find what is likely to be a causal relation between poverty and social relations. However, this effect of poverty on social outcomes, in turn, varies between different definitions of poverty. Here it appears that economic deprivation, primarily indicated by the ability of raising money with short notice, is the strongest predictor of social outcomes. Income poverty, whether in absolute or (particularly) relative terms, are weaker predictors of social outcomes, which is interesting as they are the two most common indicators of poverty in existing research.

Even if we are fortunate to have panel data at our disposal, there are limitations in our analyses that render our conclusions tentative. One is that we do not have a random allocation to the comparison groups at t 0 ; another that there is a 10-year span between the waves that we analyze, and both poverty and social outcomes may vary across this time-span. We have been able to address these problems by conditioning on the outcome at t 0 and by controlling for confounders, but in order to perform more rigorous tests future research would benefit from data with a more detailed temporal structure, and preferably with an experimental or at least quasi-experimental design.

Finally, our analyses concern Sweden, and given the position as an active welfare state with a low degree of inequality and low poverty rates, one can ask whether the results are valid also for other comparable countries. While both the level of poverty and the pattern of social relations differ between countries (for policy or cultural reasons), we believe that the mechanisms linking poverty and social outcomes are of a quite general kind, especially as the “costs for social participation” can be expected to be relative to the general wealth of a country—however, until comparative longitudinal data become available, this must remain a hypothesis for future research.

1 http://www.sofi.su.se/english/2.17851/research/three-research-departments/lnu-level-of-living .

2 We have tested various alternative codings and the overall pattern of results in terms of e.g., direction of effects and differences across poverty definitions are similar, but more difficult to present in an accessible way.

3 Our deprivation questions are however designed to reduce the impact of subjectivity by asking, e.g., about getting a specified sum within a specified time (see below).

4 In the equivalence scale, the first adult gets a weight of one, the second of 0.6, and each child gets a weight of 0.5.

5 We have also tried using single indicators (either a/b or i/ii) without detecting any meaningful difference between them. One would perhaps have assumed that poverty would be more consequential for having others over to one’s own place, but the absence of support for this can perhaps be understood in light of the strong social norm of reciprocity in social relations.

6 We have refrained from using information on voting and membership in trade unions and political parties, because these indicators do not capture the active, social nature of civic engagement to the same extent as participation in meetings and the holding of positions.

7 We have also estimated models with a more extensive health variable, a s ymptom index , which sums responses to 47 questions about self-reported health symptoms. However, this variable has virtually zero effects once global self-rated health is controlled, and does not lead to any substantive differences in other estimates. Adding the global health measure and the symptom index as TVC had no effect either.

8 Using the other indicators of poverty yields very similar results, although for some of those the difference between poor and non-poor is smaller.

9 We call these comparison groups ”never poor” and ”constantly poor” for expository purposes, although their poverty status pertains only to the years 2000 and 2010, i.e., without information on the years in between.

10 With this design we allow different effects of poverty on improvement versus deterioration of the social outcome. We have also estimated models with a lagged dependent variable, which constrains the effects of poverty changes to be of the same size for deterioration as for improvement of the social outcome. Conclusions from that analysis are roughly a weighted average of the estimates for deterioration and improvement that we report. As our analyses suggest that effects of poverty differ in size depending on the value of the lagged dependent variable (the social outcome) our current specification gives a more adequate representation of the process.

11 We have also tested models with a wider range of controls for, e.g., economic and social background (i.e. characteristics of the respondent’s parents), geography, detailed family type and a more detailed health variable, but none of these had any impact on the estimated poverty effects.

12 It is also possible that we register reverse causality, namely if worsening social outcomes that occur after t 0 lead to poverty at t 1 . This situation is almost inevitable when using panel data with no clear temporal ordering of events occurring between waves. However, reverse causality strikes us, in this case, as theoretically implausible.

13 We have also estimated models controlling for changes in health, which did not change the results.

14 If respondents’ judgments of the deprivation questions (access to cash margin and ability to pay rent, food, bills etc.) change due to non-economic factors that are related to changes in social relations, the better predictive capacity of the deprivation measure may be caused by a larger bias in this measure than in the (register-based) income measures.

15 As mentioned above, this variable may to some extent be endogenous (i.e., a mediator of the poverty effect rather than a confounder), in which case we get a downward bias of estimates.

Contributor Information

Carina Mood, Phone: +44-8-402 12 22, Email: [email protected] .

Jan O. Jonsson, Phone: +44 1865 278513, Email: [email protected] .

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The World Bank

The World Bank Group is committed to fighting poverty in all its dimensions. We use the latest data, evidence and analysis to help countries develop policies to improve people's lives, with a focus on the poorest and most vulnerable.

Almost 700 million people around the world live today in extreme poverty – they subsist on less than $2.15 per day, the extreme poverty line. Just over half of these people live in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

After several decades of continuous global poverty reduction, a period of significant crises and shocks resulted in around three years of lost progress between 2020-2022. Low-income countries, which saw poverty increase during this period, have not yet recovered and are not closing the gap. 

At the mid-point of the SDGs, the world is off track. At current rates of progress, the world will likely not meet the global goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, with estimates indicating nearly 600 million people will still be struggling in extreme poverty by then. 

Extreme poverty is concentrated in places where it will be hardest to eradicate—parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, conflict-affected areas, and in rural areas. The outlook is also grim for almost half of the world’s population, which lives on less than $6.85 a day – the measure used for upper-middle-income countries. 

Children are more than twice as likely as adults to live in extreme poverty. They comprise more than half of those living in extreme poverty, yet their share of the total population is just 31 percent.   

It is critical to tackle poverty in all its dimensions. Countries cannot adequately address poverty and inequality without also improving people’s well-being, including through more equitable access to health, education and basic infrastructure. 

Inequality remains unacceptably high around the world. 2020 was a turning point, when global inequality rose for the first time in decades, as the poorest people bore the steepest costs of the pandemic. Income losses of the world’s poorest were twice as high as the richest. The poorest also faced large setbacks in health and education which, if left unaddressed by policy action, will have lasting consequences for their future income prospects. 

Inequalities of income, education, and opportunity are all interconnected and must be addressed together. Reducing inequalities of opportunity and of incomes among individuals, populations, and regions can foster social cohesion and boost general well-being.  

Policymakers must intensify efforts to grow their economies, while protecting the most vulnerable. Jobs and employment are the surest way to reduce poverty and inequality. Impact is further multiplied in communities and across generations if we purposefully empower women and girls, and young people. 

Last Updated: Oct 17, 2023

Strategies to reach the least well-off must be tailored to each country’s context, considering the latest data and analysis, and the needs of the population. How the world responds to major challenges today will have a direct bearing on whether the current reversals in global poverty reduction can be turned around.

The World Bank provides recommendations for a complementary two-track approach: responding effectively to the urgent crisis in the short run, while continuing to focus on foundational development problems, including conflict and climate change.

Closing the gaps between policy aspiration and attainment

Too often, there is a wide gap between policies as articulated and their attainment in practice—between what citizens rightfully expect, and what they experience daily. Policy aspirations can be laudable, but there is likely to be considerable variation in the extent to which they can be realized, and in which groups benefit from them. For example, at the local level, those who have the least influence in a community might not be able to access basic services. It is critical to forge implementation strategies that can rapidly and flexibly respond to close the gaps.

Enhancing learning, improving data

From information gathered in household surveys to pixels captured by satellite images, data can inform policies and spur economic activity, serving as a powerful weapon in the fight against poverty. More data is available today than ever before, yet its value is largely untapped. Data is also a double-edged sword, requiring a social contract that builds trust by protecting people against misuse and harm, and works toward equal access and representation.

Investing in preparedness and prevention

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that years of progress in reducing poverty can quickly disappear when a crisis strikes. Prevention measures often have low political payoff, with little credit given for disasters averted. Over time, populations with no lived experience of calamity can become complacent, presuming that such risks have been eliminated or can readily be addressed if they happen. COVID-19, together with climate change and enduring conflicts, reminds us of the importance of investing in preparedness and prevention measures comprehensively and proactively.

Expanding cooperation and coordination

Contributing to and maintaining public goods require extensive cooperation and coordination. This is crucial for promoting widespread learning and improving the data-driven foundations of policymaking. It is also important for forming a sense of shared solidarity during crises and ensuring that the difficult policy choices by officials are both trusted and trustworthy.

Overall, with more than 60 percent of the world’s extreme poor living in middle-income countries, we cannot focus solely on low-income countries if we want to end extreme poverty. We need to focus on the poorest people, regardless of where they live, and work with countries at all income levels to invest in their well-being and their future.

The goal to end extreme poverty works hand in hand with the World Bank Group’s goal to promote shared prosperity, focused on increasing income growth among the bottom 40 percent in every country. Boosting shared prosperity broadly translates into improving the welfare of the least well-off in each country and includes a strong emphasis on tackling persistent inequalities that keep people in poverty from generation to generation.

Our work at the World Bank Group is based on strong country-led programs to improve living conditions—to drive growth, raise median incomes, create jobs, fully incorporate women and young people into economies, address environmental and climate challenges, and support stronger, more stable economies for everyone.

We continue to work closely with countries to help them find the best ways to improve the lives of their least advantaged citizens.

The World Bank Group works to end poverty in several ways:

  • Funding projects that can have transformational impacts on communities.
  • Collecting and analyzing the critical data and evidence needed to target these programs to reach the poorest and most vulnerable.
  • Helping governments create more inclusive, effective policies that can benefit entire populations and lay the groundwork for prosperity for future generations. 

Some examples:

  • Cambodia has achieved remarkable progress in reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity, but  key reforms  are needed to sustain pro-poor growth. The World Bank is supporting Cambodia to help address the country’s challenges of limited economic diversification, rapidly increasing urbanization, human capital deficiencies, and infrastructure gaps.
  • Mexico has experienced high income inequality and concentration of poverty in a few states. The World Bank Group  has supported Mexico’s efforts  to develop a more inclusive, effective, and integrated social protection system including relaunching a conditional cash transfer program to help improve access to higher education and formal employment.
  • In one of India’s poorest states, Bihar, a  program financed by the World Bank  has transformed livelihoods by mobilizing almost 10 million rural women into self-help groups and granting them access to finance and markets to start and expand their businesses.
  • A  pilot program in Ecuador  used text messages to relay information and encouragement to caregivers in an impoverished region of the country and saw a significant improvement in the nutrition and health of children.
  • Since 2007, a team of experts from the World Bank has been helping Kenya  strengthen statistical capacity  by reshaping its National Bureau of Statistics. With World Bank’s support, the bureau implemented a range of surveys to update key indicators of official statistics and improved the data ecosystem. The project is funded by $50 million from the World Bank’s  International Development Association  (IDA).
  • In-depth maps in countries such as  Afghanistan ,  Bangladesh ,  Croatia ,  Republic of Serbia , and Vietnam show where economic diversity and gaps in services exist within a country. This, as part of the poverty assessment process, helps policymakers better target policies and programs to reach and benefit the poor.
  • Yemen’s high  malnutrition rates have  drawn global attention, highlighting the impact the country’s five-and-half-year civil war has had on its population. The  Emergency Crisis Response Project  gives pregnant women and women with children under the age of five money to buy food and teaches them about child nutrition. It has been able to reach more than 165,000 pregnant or lactating women and 175,000 children so far.
  • Conflict-affected communities in Mindanao are among the poorest in the Philippines, suffering from poor infrastructure and lack of basic services. The World Bank along with other partners have aimed to enhance access to services and economic opportunities and build social cohesion. These  projects  have help build water systems, community centers, sanitation facilities, access roads, post-harvest facilities, and farming and fishing equipment, benefiting 650,000 people in 284 villages in a decade.
  • An innovative series of rapid  survey methodologies  were pioneered in Somalia, one of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The surveys overcame significant security and implementation obstacles to yield the most comprehensive analysis of the welfare of the Somali people in decades and is now being used in other countries. 

Last Updated: Nov 30, 2022

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Extreme poverty: How far have we come, and how far do we still have to go?

The world has made immense progress against extreme poverty, but it is still the reality for almost one in ten people worldwide..

Two centuries ago, the majority of the world population was extremely poor. Back then, it was widely believed that widespread poverty was inevitable. But this turned out to be wrong. Economic growth is possible, and poverty can decline. The world has made immense progress against extreme poverty.

But even after two centuries of progress, extreme poverty is still the reality for every tenth person in the world. This is what the ‘international poverty line’ highlights – this metric plays an important (and successful) role in focusing the world’s attention on the very poorest people in the world.

The poorest people today live in countries that have achieved no economic growth. This stagnation of the world’s poorest economies is one of the largest problems of our time. Unless this changes, hundreds of millions of people will continue to live in extreme poverty.

The state of poverty today

There are poor people in every country, people who live in poor housing and who struggle to afford basic goods and services like heating, transport, and healthy food for themselves and their families.

The definition of poverty differs from country to country, but in high-income countries, the poverty line is around $30 per day . 1

Even in the world’s richest countries, a substantial share of people – between every 10th and every 5th person – lives below this poverty line.

In the map below, and in all international poverty statistics on Our World in Data, the data is adjusted for inflation and cross-country differences in the price level. The expandable section below the map provides a more detailed explanation of how.

Basics of global poverty measurement

Throughout this article – and in global income and expenditure data generally – the statisticians who produce these figures are careful to make these numbers as comparable as possible.

Non-monetary sources of income are taken into account

Many poor people today and in the past rely on subsistence farming and do not have a monetary income. To take this into account and make a fair comparison of their living standards, the statisticians that produce these figures estimate the monetary value of their home production and add it to their income/expenditure.

Differences in purchasing power and inflation are taken into account

The data is expressed in international dollars . This is a hypothetical currency that results from price adjustments across time and place. 2  An international dollar is defined as having the same purchasing power as one US-$ in the US . This means no matter where in the world a person is living on int.-$30, they can buy the goods and services that cost $30 in the US. None of these adjustments are ever going to be perfect, but in a world where price differences are large, it is important to attempt to account for these differences as well as possible, and this is what these adjustments do. 3

Throughout this text, I’m always adjusting incomes for price changes over time and price differences between countries in this way. All dollar values discussed here are presented in int.-$; the UN does the same for the $2.15 poverty line. Sometimes I leave out ‘international’ as it is awkward to repeat it all the time; but every time I mention any $ amount in this text, I’m referring to international-$ and not US-$. 4

Global data is a mix of income and expenditure data

There is no global survey of incomes: researchers need to rely on the available national surveys. Such surveys are designed with cross-country comparability in mind, but because they reflect the circumstances and priorities of individual countries, there are some important differences across countries. In most high-income countries, the surveys capture people’s incomes, while in poorer countries, these surveys tend to capture people’s consumption.

The two concepts are closely related: the income of a household equals their consumption plus any saving (or minus any borrowing). When speaking about these statistics, it would therefore be accurate to speak about ‘the income of people in richer countries and the monetary value of consumption in poorer countries’. But since it’d be a bit much to repeat this every time, researchers simply speak of ‘living standards’ or ‘income’ instead. I do the same in this text.

We can apply this $30-a-day-poverty-line to the global income distribution to see the share in poverty as judged by the definition of poverty in high-income countries. 5

The latest global data tells us that the huge majority – 84% of the world population – live on less than $30 per day. That means 6.7 billion people.

Showing the global income distribution and highlighting that 84% are living below $30 per day

Why is an extremely low poverty line necessary?

Extreme poverty is defined by the UN as living on less than $2.15 a day. Why do we need a poverty line that is so extremely low?

It is not enough to measure global poverty solely by a higher poverty line because a large number of people are living in extreme poverty. Without an extremely low poverty line, we would not be able to see that a large share of the world lives in such deep poverty.

If we’d only rely on the poverty line from high-income countries, we would hide the differences between people with very different living standards. Whether someone was living on almost $30 a day or on thirty times less would not matter – they would all be considered ‘poor’.

It is however a good idea to add additional poverty lines. As the following chart shows, this can draw attention to the large income differences between people and highlights how many live on extremely low incomes. 6

Showing the global income distribution and highlighting that 8% live in extreme poverty

The $2.15 poverty line, set by the UN, shows that globally close to one in ten people live in extreme poverty. In all these statistics, the researchers are not only taking people’s monetary income into account, but also their non-monetary income and home production. One reason why this is important is because many poor people are small-scale farmers who produce their own food. 7

The UN’s global poverty line is valuable because it has been successful in drawing attention to the terrible depths of extreme poverty of the poorest people in the world. 8

In a related essay , I focus on global poverty as defined by a higher poverty line.

The big lesson of the last 200 years: Economic growth is possible, poverty is not inevitable

What needs explanation is not poverty, but prosperity. Deep poverty was the condition that the majority of humanity has always lived in. In the pre-modern days, hunger was widespread , and every second child died no matter where in the world it was born.

Historian Michail Moatsos has recently produced a new global dataset that goes back two centuries. The chart shows his data. According to his research three-quarters of the world lived in extreme poverty in 1820. This means they "could not afford a tiny space to live, some minimum heating capacity, and food that would not induce malnutrition.” 9

The chart looks simple, but it would be a mistake to think that it was simple to produce this data. Underlying it is a wealth of careful historical research that Moatsos made use of. Historians gathered data for people around the world over two centuries to reconstruct how many of them were able to afford a set of very basic goods and services and aggregated this detailed information into this final picture. You find more information on the methodology in the footnote. 10

Economic growth made it possible to leave poverty behind

Economic growth made it possible to leave the widespread extreme poverty of the past behind. It made the difference between a society in which the majority were lacking even the most basic goods and services – food, decent housing and clothes, healthcare, public infrastructure and transport – and a society in which these products are widely available.

Growth means that a society produces an increasing quantity and quality of economic goods and services. The key to economic growth is the development of technology that makes it possible to increase productivity by which these goods and services are produced.

Because the total production in an economy equals the total income in that country – as everyone’s spending is someone else’s income – incomes grow at the same rate as production increases.

The 9 charts show the data for different regions in the world. On the horizontal axis of each chart, you find the average income (GDP per capita) and on the vertical axis you see the share living in extreme poverty. The starting point of each trajectory shows the data for 1820 and it tells us that two centuries ago the majority of people lived in extreme poverty, no matter where in the world they were at home. 11 Since then, all world regions achieved growth – the production of goods and services increased – and the share living in poverty declined.

[See also my related article: 'What is Economic Growth? ]

term paper on poverty

Most extremely poor people today are living in Africa

How far do we still have to go?

The previous chart showed that Sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest region. Almost 40% of the population lives in extreme poverty.

Not all African countries are struggling. In fact, most African countries have achieved good growth after the end of the oppressive colonial regimes that hindered the growth of African economies. But in a number of countries, the situation is bad. These countries remain as poor as they were in the past. Since the economy is stagnant, poverty is too.

In the chart below, you see that mean incomes have actually fallen in some of the world’s poorest countries. 12

To see the consequences of this, let’s first focus on one country that achieved large growth and then contrast it with a country that did not.

A country that achieved large growth is the UK: the orange distribution on the left shows incomes in the UK two centuries ago; the majority lived in extreme poverty. The green distribution shows how the distribution of incomes has changed since then. Two centuries of economic growth lifted the majority of people out of the deep poverty of the past. 13

term paper on poverty

The next chart shows the income distribution of the UK in 2019 in green – just as in the previous chart – and in red the income distribution of Madagascar, a country that did not achieve growth.

The majority of people in Madagascar still live in extreme poverty. Very similar to the global situation two centuries ago, three-quarters of Madagascar’s population are living in extreme poverty.

term paper on poverty

Not just economic growth, but also the distribution of that growth matters. If the inequality of income increases, the poorest can be left behind.

But without economic growth, there is no chance at all to leave poverty behind. The data from Madagascar makes clear that a reduction of inequality cannot end extreme poverty in a poor country. If inequality in Madagascar would be entirely eradicated, then everyone would live on the average income. In Madagascar, this is $1.60 a day. For poor countries, the only way to end poverty is an increase in incomes – economic growth.

The majority of the world is making good progress against poverty, but not all: some of the very poorest economies are stagnating

The history of extreme poverty is, at the same time, one of humanity’s greatest achievements and failures.

The majority of the world left extreme poverty behind. To me, this ranks among the most impressive and most important achievements in humanity’s history.

But, as we’ve seen, the fight against extreme poverty is far from over. Almost one in ten people still live in extreme poverty right now.

The worry with extreme poverty today is that some of the world’s poorest countries are not growing. Unless this changes, hundreds of millions of people will continue to live in extreme poverty.

Crucially this was true before the pandemic hit – even before COVID, researchers expected that half a billion people would remain in extreme poverty by 2030. The global recession that followed the pandemic exacerbated this further.

When it comes to the consequences of climate change , this is what I am most worried about. Richer people will be able to adapt in many ways. It is the extremely poor population that will be hardest hit.

The economic stagnation of some of the world's poorest countries is not as widely known as it should be. I think it deserves more attention. If the stagnation of the very poorest economies persists, we will see a growing divide at the lowest end of the global income distribution. While the living standards of the majority of the world are rising, some of the world’s very poorest people remain in extreme poverty.

Whether or not the poorest countries achieve growth is among the most important questions for the coming years. It will decide whether humanity wins its long fight against extreme poverty or not.

Last updated in 2023

This article was first published on November 22, 2021. It was last updated in August 2023.

For the moment, it is important to note that this $30 per day poverty line is defined in international-$ and therefore comparable with the ‘International Poverty Line’ discussed in the following section. More details about how to compare incomes across countries, the income concept here, and the definition of this poverty line follow further below in this text.

This is possible by relying on the work of the International Comparison Project , which monitors the prices of goods and services around the world.

Angus Deaton and Alan Heston (2010) discuss the methods behind such price adjustments and many of the difficulties and limitations involved.

Deaton, A., and Heston, A. 2010. “Understanding PPPs and PPP-Based National Accounts.” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 2 (4): 1–35. A working paper version is available online here .

Keep in mind that in the special case of the US, the US-$ equals the international-$.

Remember that these statistics take the cost of living into account – a person who lives on less than int-$30 is a person who cannot afford the goods and services that cost US-$30 in the US .

If you want to explore this data for any world region or any individual country, you can do so here .

See also the previous box on poverty measurement. This is, of course, also true of the historical research.

Indeed, there is an argument for using an even lower poverty line. To understand what is happening to the very poorest in the world, we need to look even lower than $2.15. This is because one of the biggest failures of development is that over the last decades, the incomes of the very poorest people have not risen. A big part of the reason for why this issue doesn’t get discussed enough is that the International Poverty Line we rely on is too high to see this fact.

Michail Moatsos (2021) – Global extreme poverty: Present and past since 1820. Published in OECD (2021), How Was Life? Volume II: New Perspectives on Well-being and Global Inequality since 1820 , OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/3d96efc5-en .

The sources for the measures shown in this chart and the following chart are:

Jutta Bolt and Jan Luiten van Zanden (2021) – The GDP data in the chart is taken from The long view on economic growth: New estimates of GDP, How Was Life? Volume II: New Perspectives on Well-being and Global Inequality since 1820 , OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/3d96efc5-en .

The latest datapoint for the poverty data refers to 2018, while the latest datapoint for GDP per capita in the chart below refers to 2016. In that chart, I have chosen the middle year (2017) as the reference year.

The historical poverty research was done by economic historian Michail Moatsos and is based on the ‘cost of basic needs’-approach as suggested by Robert Allen (2017) and recommended by the late Tony Atkinson.

The ‘cost of basic needs’-approach was recommended by the ‘World Bank Commission on Global Poverty’, headed by Tony Atkinson, as a complementary method in measuring poverty. The report for the ‘World Bank Commission on Global Poverty’ can be found here .

Tony Atkinson – and after his death, his colleagues – turned this report into a book that was published as Anthony B. Atkinson (2019) – Measuring Poverty around the World. You find more information on Atkinson’s website .

The CBN-approach Moatsos’ work is based on was suggested by Allen in Robert Allen (2017) – Absolute poverty: When necessity displaces desire. In American Economic Review, Vol. 107/12, pp. 3690-3721, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20161080

Moatsos describes the methodology as follows: “In this approach, poverty lines are calculated for every year and country separately, rather than using a single global line. The second step is to gather the necessary data to operationalize this approach, alongside imputation methods in cases where not all the necessary data are available. The third step is to devise a method for aggregating countries’ poverty estimates on a global scale to account for countries that lack some of the relevant data.” In his publication – linked above – you find much more detail on all of the shown poverty data.

The speed at which extreme poverty declined increased over time, as the chart shows. Moatsos writes, “It took 136 years from 1820 for our global poverty rate to fall under 50%, then another 45 years to cut this rate in half again by 2001. In the early 21st century, global poverty reduction accelerated, and in 13 years, our global measure of extreme poverty was halved again by 2014.”

Parts of Western Europe and the US had already achieved some growth in the decades before this chart begins so that the share in poverty had already fallen, but even in 1820 the majority was still living in extreme poverty there

In the centuries and millennia before, no region in the world had achieved sustained economic growth (see, for example, my post on the Malthusian Trap and links therein). The chart here focuses on the very exceptional two last centuries when economic growth reduced widespread poverty.

You can explore related data in detail in this chart for growth measured as GDP per capita and in our Poverty Data Explorer .

The data shown in the small plots of the income distribution in the UK and Madagascar is again taken from PovcalNet – the predecessor to the World Bank's Poverty and Inequality Platform – Gapminder, and Michail Moatsos 2021.

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Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States Term Paper

Introduction, back to the roots, societal values and beliefs affecting welfare eligibility, the scope of the problem and the population groups affected, underlying factors, response to poverty throughout history.

Poverty and treating the poor have always been a matter of concern starting from biblical times and up to today. They are the contributing sources of a broader challenge – building up a welfare society. Helping the poor has always been an obligation of the wealthiest – those who had real power in their hands enough to make other members of a community pay taxes that would be redirected to solving the problem of poverty.

As time passes, the problem becomes even more significant. Current changes in the global economic environment led to the deterioration of socio-economic stability thus adding to the challenge of overcoming the issue of poorness. That is why it is vital to provide insight into the history of this social welfare problem to find a solution to the headache the United States is facing today.

The New World, especially if compared to the Old, at the dawn of its history has not experienced the lack of natural resources. Together with a sparse population settling new lands and liberal policies for land management, the problem of widespread destitution of the European countries was not familiar to this part of the world. That said, unemployment has never been a real challenge here.

Nevertheless, unemployment is not the only source of poverty, and the New World was hardly the land of wealth and prosperity. Thinking of the people who were sent to settle these territories answer all questions that might arise in one’s head. Those who arrived to settle the colonies were primarily vagrants, convicts, political prisoners, orphans, and other undesirable social groups and unemployed people, and they were poor. A couple of wealthy land proprietors and tax-dodgers could not weigh down the balance in the situation towards the nation’s prosperity, as it was their wealth that bothered them (Trattner, 1999).

At this point in history, poverty and hardships were imported from the Old World to New and raised the necessity to design and adopt permanent poor relief policies similar to those established by the 1601 English Poor Law. Most colonies were self-governed by colonial assemblies that quickly decreed that those who cannot take care of themselves are the responsibility of local taxpayers. This practice was adopted in the Plymouth Colony in 1642. Virginia followed this tendency in 1646, Connecticut in 1673, Massachusetts in 1692. Other colonies were in keeping with the tendency and adopted similar policies later.

That said, the seventeenth century has become the point in American history at which poverty was determined as a social welfare problem. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, those who held authority in their hands were obliged to conduct regular surveys aimed at determining those who needed a local community and the ways to help them. Among the fighters against poverty, one could mention Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Benjamin Rush, Thomas Bond, Stephen Girard, and some others.

Some several societal values and beliefs affected welfare eligibility and fighting poverty in the early history of the New World. First of all, having rich resources, sparse population, and thin labor, human life was celebrated. Local communities believed that helping the poor and the needy had a direct impact on their welfare. That is why it was a moral and legal responsibility of local people to build the welfare state.

However, the accent was made on motivating them to work with the focus on prevention and rehabilitation. Moreover, policies were soaked with white supremacy because black people were believed to be the children of Satan, who could not have the right to social aid but were the responsibility of their masters. Finally, value was seen in education as a tool for preventing poverty. It can be proved by the widespread practice of apprenticeship – educating illegitimate, pauper or orphaned white children (Trattner, 1999).

In the United States, the scope of the problem is assessed by the Census Bureau, which determines the official poverty rate and defines the groups of the population affected. According to the latest information from the Bureau, the official poverty rate was 14.8 percent (46.7 million people) in 2014. Even though 2014 was the fourth consecutive year that has not demonstrated changes in the statistical estimates of poverty if compared to the previous years, this figure was still 2.3 percent higher than in 2007 (United States Census Bureau , 2015). It means that the U.S. authorities cannot cope with the problem since the latest economic recession.

This problem affects different groups of the population. In general, in 2014, the poverty rate for people under 18 years old was 21.1 percent (15.5 million), for those aged 18 to 64 – 13.5 percent (26.5 million), and for people above 65 years old – 10.0 percent (4.6 million). The poverty rate for different population groups is as follows: 42.1 percent of people in poverty were non-Hispanic Whites, 26.2 percent were Blacks, 12.0 percent were Asians, and 23,6 percent were Hispanics.

Speaking of sex, the poverty rate was 16.1 percent for females and 13.4 percent for males. As of both age and gender, 12.1 percent of women and 7.4 percent of men above 65 years old, 15.4 percent of women and 18.6 percent of men aged 18 to 64, and 21.1 percent of girls and 21.2 percent of boys under 18 years old were in poverty. Of all people in poverty, 13.4 percent were foreign-born and 86.6 percent were native-born. 14.5 percent of poor people dwelled inside metropolitans and 16.5 percent lived outside. As of work experience, the poverty rate was 6.9 percent for workers in general, 3.0 percent for those employed full-time, 15.9 percent for people working less than full-time, and 24.9 percent for unemployed.

There were 28.5 percent of people with disabilities and 12.3 percent without disability in poverty. Speaking of educational achievements, the poverty rate for those above 25 years old with a high school diploma was 28.9 percent, with college but no degree – 10.0 percent, and with a degree (at least bachelor’s) – 5.0 percent. Finally, 11.6 percent of families lived in poverty: 6.2 percent for married couples, 30.6 percent for female householder families, and 15.7 percent for male householder families (DeNavas-White & Proctor, 2015).

There is a wide range of factors that influence poverty in the United States. Race, sex, the level of education, age, ethnicity, access to power, societal values, etc. all contribute to poverty. In general, it is the culture that is the main factor that impacts the social welfare. It was historically determined that some people are more exposed to the risk of poverty than the others, and the statistics provided above prove it. For example, even though slavery was abolished long ago, the black population is still more susceptible to poverty. It is usually aggravated by the existence of white supremacy, the foundation of racial discrimination, in the United States (Vaught, 2011).

Gender is usually an issue because of the relatively recent granting of equal rights to women and the fact that females are still searching for their place in life. Moreover, many families still have traditional worldview believing that woman should be a housewife and mother, not working. It leads to higher unemployment rates among females and entails higher poverty rates if compared to males (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016).

The most significant factor is access to power and freedom in decision-making. It can be viewed from two perspectives – decision-making at the local or national levels and that at a personal level. The overall rule is the following – the poorer the person, the less access to authority and freedom, especially economic, he or she has. At the higher levels, more access to authority implies the ability to make wealthy even wealthier through adopting conforming legislation. At the personal level, it relates to the level of income and financial capabilities of an individual (Carwalho, Meier & Wang, 2016).

Moreover, poor people usually become a part of the so-called culture of poverty. Poor people are financially vulnerable, illiterate, have little or no access to healthcare, marginalized, and fall victim to discrimination (Ahmed, 2013). All together these features lead to the change of personality, so even when they receive the permanent source of income and become wealthy, it is impossible to eradicate poverty from their mentality.

Throughout the history of the American state, there have been numerous official attempts to remedy the problem of poverty. For example, in 1764, The Society for Encouraging Industry and Employing the Poor was created in Boston, later in South Carolina, and Philadelphia. Another step was adopting the Declaration of Independence and slavery abolition. Furthermore, there were other official initiatives such as the founding of the Committee on Superintendence of the Poor (Trattner, 1999).

One of the modern strategies for eradicating poverty was the decentralization of policies under the governance of Ronald Reagan. It means that the responsibility for handling the problem and designing welfare programs was granted to local and states authorities believing that local authorities would be more effective in overcoming local challenges. The focus was made on motivating people to work through adopting punitive measures to those unemployed. Later, in the 1980-1990s specific attention was paid to the workers’ good behavior, i.e. perseverance and hard-working as the foundation for poverty eradication (Barany, 2016). The impact of these steps was rather negative than positive because of the sense of entitlement established in the American society.

Nowadays, the policy is based on the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act including initiatives for eradicating poverty such as enhancing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, prevent the increase of the homelessness rate, maximizing support to job training funds, and providing tax breaks to working families ( Poverty , n.d.).

The findings of the paper demonstrate that poverty has been a real challenge throughout the history of the American State. The policies mentioned above might have a positive impact on the poverty rate dynamics, but what should be done in the first place is unveiling the myths about the United States such as believing that America is the land of opportunities and poverty is the natural consequence of laziness and unemployment ( Poverty statistics: USA poverty, 2016). That said, the change in mentality together with relevant policies is the key to handling the problem.

Ahmed, F. E. (2013). The market at the bottom of the pyramid: Understanding the culture of poverty. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 12(4), 489-513. Web.

Barany, D. (2016) From whence cometh this Welfare consensus? US welfare policy discourse as class warfare in the 1980s and 1990s. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy , 36 (3-4), 203-225. Web.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2016). Labor force statistics from the current population survey . Web.

Carwalho, L. S., Meier, S., & Wang, S. W. (2016). Poverty and economic decision-making: Evidence from changes in financial resources at payday. American Economic Review, 106 (2), 260-284. Web.

DeNavas-White, C., & Proctor, B. D. (2015). Income and poverty in the United States, 2014: Current populations report . Web.

Poverty statistics: USA poverty. (2016). Web.

Poverty. (n.d.). Web.

Trattner, W. I. (1999). From poor law to welfare state: A history of social welfare in America (6th ed.). New York, NY: The Free Press. Web.

United States Census Bureau. (2015). 2014 highlights . Web.

Vaught, S. E. (2011). Racism, public schooling, and the entrenchment of white supremacy: A critical race ethnography. Albany, NY: New York Press. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2020, July 19). Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States. https://ivypanda.com/essays/poverty-and-social-welfare-in-the-united-states/

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IvyPanda . 2020. "Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States." July 19, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/poverty-and-social-welfare-in-the-united-states/.

1. IvyPanda . "Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States." July 19, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/poverty-and-social-welfare-in-the-united-states/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States." July 19, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/poverty-and-social-welfare-in-the-united-states/.

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Poverty Is a Choice

Extreme poverty has declined, but the line is very low.

term paper on poverty

We live in what often feels like a biblically terrible time, marked by mass extinctions, deep recessions, epidemics, climate emergencies, inequality, and forever wars. But one thing, at least, has gotten better. More than 1 billion people have escaped extreme poverty—so many, so fast, that the world might be able to declare, within a decade, the end of this most miserable form of deprivation. “The global poverty rate is now lower than it has ever been in recorded history,” Jim Yong Kim, a former president of the World Bank, recently argued . “This is one of the greatest human achievements of our time.”

Or perhaps not. In an acidic rebuke to world leaders, the outgoing United Nations special rapporteur on poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, argues that the effort to end global poverty has failed. More people live in deprivation now than two decades ago. “We squandered a decade in the fight against poverty, with misplaced triumphalism blocking the very reforms that could have prevented the worst impacts of the pandemic,” Alston wrote in his last report .

So who’s right: Alston or Kim? The pessimistic argument is a hard one to make when looking at the raw, headline numbers. The global extreme-poverty rate fell from 36 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015; the number of poor people dropped from 2 billion to 700 million. But Alston believes that by focusing only on those numbers, the world is deluding itself.

Read: A moral case for giving people money

The divisions between the World Bank’s economists and the UN’s special rapporteur are in some sense technical, about where to set the poverty line. They are in a more important sense interpretive, about whether progress has been fast or slow, and whether today’s global poverty counts are laudable or tragic.

This is a realm of yes-and s and no-but s, not direct refutations. Extreme poverty has declined rapidly, but the extreme-poverty line is very low: A person living below it spends no more than $1.90 a day, enough in many poor countries to cover some starch, a few fruits and vegetables, some cooking oil, a bit of protein, and that’s about it—with nothing left over for utilities, education, health care, transportation, or investment in wealth-generating assets, such as a cow or a motorbike. That poverty threshold represents “a staggeringly low standard of living, well below any reasonable conception of a life with dignity,” Alston argues—it is a catastrophic-destitution measure, not a poverty measure. He emphasizes the lack of progress made at the $3.20-a-day and $5.50-a-day poverty lines, too. Half the world lives on less than the latter figure.

Alston takes issue with the fact that the World Bank’s extreme-poverty line is an absolute measure, not a relative one: It sets a line and sees how many people cross it, country by country, rather than pegging the poverty threshold to median income, country by country. But “relative poverty is what really counts these days,” Alston told me, as it captures social exclusion, and the way that living on a few dollars a day is more challenging in middle-income countries like India and Kenya than in low-income countries like Afghanistan and Chad. “In a poorer country,” the bank itself explains , “participating in the job market may require only clothing and food, whereas someone in a richer society may also need access to the internet, transportation, and a cell phone.”

The bank also acknowledges that the global extreme-poverty line is low. It has generated a measure that includes relative poverty, and produces counts at the $3.20-a-day and $5.50-a-day lines. Its economists, researchers, and program experts stress that rising above the extreme-poverty line is no guarantee against malnutrition, stunted growth, early death, or any of the other horrible consequences of destitution.

But Alston’s most controversial, and most important, argument is that the focus on progress measured against the $1.90-a-day line—the prevalence of “everything’s getting better” arguments, made by Davos types like Bill Gates and Steven Pinker —has hampered progress toward true poverty eradication, and toward civil rights, social inclusion, and a basic standard of living for all. “By being able to rely so heavily on the World Bank's flagship figure, they can say, ‘Look, progress has been consistent. We’ve been doing great,’” Alston told me. “The implication of that is that the triumph of neoliberalism has brought with it very significant benefits for poor people. In reality, that’s just not the case.”

Read: How many people in the world are actually poor?

What if world leaders and multilateral institutions focused on the $5.50 line, or measures of poverty that capture social exclusion and relative deprivation? What if the headline story were that half the world still qualifies as desperately poor, and poverty head counts remain stubbornly high in dozens of countries? What if the story were not that we are succeeding, but that we are failing?

That story would not capture all the good that has happened in terms of infant-mortality rates falling, school-enrollment numbers rising, and malnutrition fading. But it would hold the world accountable for the fact that poverty is, always and everywhere, a choice. Alston’s view, and a necessary one, is that the world cannot wait for economic expansion to lift people above the poverty line. It cannot count on trade compacts and infrastructure projects and the ticking of GDP growth rates from 2.3 to 3.2 percent to do it. It needs direct interventions by governments, as fast as possible, to eliminate inequality and build safety nets, even in the poorest places.

Poverty Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on poverty essay.

“Poverty is the worst form of violence”. – Mahatma Gandhi.

poverty essay

How Poverty is Measured?

For measuring poverty United nations have devised two measures of poverty – Absolute & relative poverty.  Absolute poverty is used to measure poverty in developing countries like India. Relative poverty is used to measure poverty in developed countries like the USA. In absolute poverty, a line based on the minimum level of income has been created & is called a poverty line.  If per day income of a family is below this level, then it is poor or below the poverty line. If per day income of a family is above this level, then it is non-poor or above the poverty line. In India, the new poverty line is  Rs 32 in rural areas and Rs 47 in urban areas.

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Causes of Poverty

According to the Noble prize winner South African leader, Nelson Mandela – “Poverty is not natural, it is manmade”. The above statement is true as the causes of poverty are generally man-made. There are various causes of poverty but the most important is population. Rising population is putting the burden on the resources & budget of countries. Governments are finding difficult to provide food, shelter & employment to the rising population.

The other causes are- lack of education, war, natural disaster, lack of employment, lack of infrastructure, political instability, etc. For instance- lack of employment opportunities makes a person jobless & he is not able to earn enough to fulfill the basic necessities of his family & becomes poor. Lack of education compels a person for less paying jobs & it makes him poorer. Lack of infrastructure means there are no industries, banks, etc. in a country resulting in lack of employment opportunities. Natural disasters like flood, earthquake also contribute to poverty.

In some countries, especially African countries like Somalia, a long period of civil war has made poverty widespread. This is because all the resources & money is being spent in war instead of public welfare. Countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. are prone to natural disasters like cyclone, etc. These disasters occur every year causing poverty to rise.

Ill Effects of Poverty

Poverty affects the life of a poor family. A poor person is not able to take proper food & nutrition &his capacity to work reduces. Reduced capacity to work further reduces his income, making him poorer. Children from poor family never get proper schooling & proper nutrition. They have to work to support their family & this destroys their childhood. Some of them may also involve in crimes like theft, murder, robbery, etc. A poor person remains uneducated & is forced to live under unhygienic conditions in slums. There are no proper sanitation & drinking water facility in slums & he falls ill often &  his health deteriorates. A poor person generally dies an early death. So, all social evils are related to poverty.

Government Schemes to Remove Poverty

The government of India also took several measures to eradicate poverty from India. Some of them are – creating employment opportunities , controlling population, etc. In India, about 60% of the population is still dependent on agriculture for its livelihood. Government has taken certain measures to promote agriculture in India. The government constructed certain dams & canals in our country to provide easy availability of water for irrigation. Government has also taken steps for the cheap availability of seeds & farming equipment to promote agriculture. Government is also promoting farming of cash crops like cotton, instead of food crops. In cities, the government is promoting industrialization to create more jobs. Government has also opened  ‘Ration shops’. Other measures include providing free & compulsory education for children up to 14 years of age, scholarship to deserving students from a poor background, providing subsidized houses to poor people, etc.

Poverty is a social evil, we can also contribute to control it. For example- we can simply donate old clothes to poor people, we can also sponsor the education of a poor child or we can utilize our free time by teaching poor students. Remember before wasting food, somebody is still sleeping hungry.

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The impact of poverty on early childhood

A young sad child

For most parents, bringing a baby into the world and nurturing a young child brings both great joy and intense love, but it also comes with many changes, and sometimes stress, pressure and anxiety. Those pressures and stresses are likely to be much greater for families who are struggling to make ends meet.  In the UK today, more than one in four families with a child under five are living in poverty .  

Experiencing poverty can cause harm at any age, but particularly for the youngest children. This is when the foundations for their physical, emotional and social development are being laid. A substantial body of research shows that family poverty is associated with and can cause poorer academic attainment and social and emotional development. Perhaps not surprisingly, poverty can be highly detrimental if it is persistent, experienced in the first three years of life and combined with other disadvantages. Given this, addressing early childhood poverty is a vital part of the jigsaw of support needed to enable young children to flourish.

The harm that poverty can inflict begins during pregnancy and is shaped by the health and well-being of parents and their socio-economic status. Gaps in development between disadvantaged and advantaged children emerge very early on. Poverty impacts are also not the same for everyone and are further compounded by inequalities in relation to parents’ ethnicity, health and economic status. By the time a child reaches 11 months there are gaps in communication and language skills, and by the age of three inequalities in children’s cognitive and social and emotional skills are evident. A large body of analysis shows how these early disadvantages can go on to affect children’s development in later life.

Importantly, this is not to say that economic disadvantage inevitably leads to poor long-term outcomes; other factors – family circumstances, wider family support, social networks and connections, educational resources and public services - all play a vital role and can mitigate the effects of poverty.

Younger children are more likely to be in poverty than other groups 

Poverty here is defined as not having enough material resources such as money, housing, or food to meet the minimum needs - both material and social – in today’s society. While there have been some key changes over the last two decades, there is one constant – children are markedly more likely to experience poverty than adults or pensioners and it is younger children who are most at risk .

This is the result of a combination of factors including the costs of children and that households with younger children are less likely to have two parents in full-time work parents. The latest figures show that there are some 4.2 million children living in poverty in the UK, a rise of 600,000 over the last decade.

Most worryingly deep poverty has been rising, particularly affecting lone parents, large families, and people living in families with a disabled person. The Runnymede Trust found that Black and minority ethnic people are currently 2.2 times more likely to be in deep poverty than white people, with Bangladeshi people more than three times more likely.  The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s report on Destitution in the UK 202 3 found that over 1 million children had experienced destitution at some point over 2022.

Poverty affects children’s material, social, educational and emotional well-being

Poverty affects young children’s experiences directly. Parents have less money to meet children’s material and social needs. The sharply rising costs of providing the basic essentials – food, warmth, lighting, housing costs, nappies, baby food, clothing - has created acute pressure for many families. Drawing on a survey of their service users, in 2022 Barnardo’s reported that 30% of parents said their child’s mental health had worsened in the previous four months, 16% said their child/ren had to share a bed with them or a sibling, and 30% were concerned about losing their home/being made homeless.

Recent research (Ruth Patrick et al. 2023 ) looked at the effects of benefit changes on larger families. It shows the many hardships that families are dealing with, the inability to meet their children’s needs and the stress and worry they feel as a result. But it also shows the resilience, strength and skills they employ to give their children the best possible life in the circumstances. Families spoke about the sheer amount of time it takes to manage on a very tight budget and its direct impact on children – from missing bath time to reading a bedtime story. This is affecting children’s educational outcomes. 95% of teachers surveyed by Kindred Squared believe that the cost-of-living crisis is going to impact school readiness next year.

Poverty gets under your skin; it takes a toll on the mental health of mothers, fathers, and wider family. The Family Stress Model, underpinned by research, shows the way in which economic stress - poverty, hardship, debt - creates psychological distress, lack of control and feelings of stigma. Not surprisingly, these stresses affect family relationships, both between parents and with children. Hardship, debt, deprivation and ‘feeling poor’ is linked to poorer maternal mental health and lower life satisfaction and this can make it more difficult to find the mental space to be an attentive and responsive parent. This in turn can affect young children’s social and emotional development and outcomes.

What can we do?

Explaining how poverty affects young children’s well-being and outcomes is important when it comes to developing effective responses: addressing poverty and hardship directly, supporting parents’, especially mothers’, mental health, and providing support for parenting.

The research also helps identify the protective factors that help to reduce the detrimental impact of poverty: wider family and neighbourhood support, good maternal and paternal mental health, access to high quality early education, warm parent-child interaction and financial and housing stability.

Early years professionals, health visitors, family support workers and many others are in the front line of the difficulties that families with young children are facing. They are responding to the legacy of the Covid pandemic and the rise in cost of living, working across service boundaries and in new ways, despite budgetary pressures.

Local services are working to meet the needs of families with young children in the round – including support for maternal mental health, parental conflict, parenting and the home learning environment. There are many voluntary initiatives, such as Save the Children’s Building Blocks, which combines giving grants to reduce the impact of material deprivation with supporting parents to play and learn with their children at home, initiatives to use local authority data to increase the take-up of benefit entitlements, and thebaby bank network, providing essential products and equipment as well as practical support for parents who are struggling.

Tackling early childhood poverty rests both on public policy which takes a holistic and joined up approach, as well as action at local level, whether that’s through local authorities, early years services in health and education, local businesses and community and voluntary initiatives.

In the Nuffield Foundation’s Changing Face of Early Childhood , we set out some core principles to address early childhood poverty including:

A multi-dimensional approach that reflects the range of socioeconomic risks and intersecting needs faced by families with young children.

Money matters - a financial bedrock for families with young children living on a low income, through improved social security benefits and access to employment, which takes account of the care needs of the under-fives.

Greater attention and investment in policies to support parental mental health and parenting from the earliest stage of a child’s life.

A more coherent, joined up and effective approach to early childhood would help to address the inequalities between children by supporting them early on in life and establishing deep roots from which they can grow and flourish.

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Poverty Has Soared in New York, With Children Bearing the Brunt

The share of New York City residents who could not afford basic essentials jumped dramatically in 2022, with one in four children living in poverty, a new report found.

An empty playground in New York City.

By Stefanos Chen

After several years of declining poverty, New York City saw a sharp reversal in 2022, when it experienced its largest yearly increase in the poverty level in a decade.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.

Twenty-three percent of the city’s residents were unable to afford basic necessities like housing and food, according to a new report by a research group at Columbia University and Robin Hood, a large philanthropic organization. In 2021, that number was 18 percent.

The number of New Yorkers living in poverty, nearly two million in all, included one in four children.

The findings mark a major setback for New York City, where expanded government aid during the coronavirus pandemic had helped to counteract job losses, rising rents and high inflation.

With most of those programs ending, poverty has risen nationwide, but the surge has been especially clear in New York, said Christopher Wimer, the director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at the Columbia School of Social Work and a co-author of the report.

The national poverty rate in 2022 was 12.4 percent, up from 7.8 percent in 2021, the largest one-year jump on record, according to the United States Census Bureau. New York City’s rate was nearly double the national average, and there are signs that the gap is widening, Dr. Wimer said.

“It’s dispiriting,” Dr. Wimer said. “We’re going in the wrong direction.”

The biggest reason for the increase in poverty, both nationally and in New York, was the end of pandemic-era policies like the expanded child tax credit, enhanced unemployment insurance and cash payments that helped low-income families keep up with rising costs, Dr. Wimer said.

The steep rise in the number of New Yorkers living in poverty, which grew by 500,000 residents in 2022, underscores wide and longstanding disparities.

Black, Latino and Asian New Yorkers were roughly twice as likely as white residents to live in poverty, according to the report, and women were more likely than men to be unable to afford their basic necessities.

The report, part of a study that began in 2012, was based on surveys of a representative sample of more than 3,600 New York City residents that were conducted in 2022 and 2023.

The researchers used a metric called the supplemental poverty measure, which considers both income and noncash support like food stamps, as well as the local cost of living.

It differs from the Census Bureau’s official poverty measure, which only counts cash resources, but versions of the supplemental measure are also widely used by government officials, including in reports put out by the city.

In 2022, under the supplemental measure, a family of New York City renters made up of two adults and two children was considered below the poverty line if it made less than about $44,000. The poverty threshold for a single adult renter was $20,340.

A major reason for the disparities seen among those living in poverty is the lopsided jobs recovery, said James Parrott, the director of economic and fiscal policy at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

Dr. Parrott, a former chief economist for New York City, was not involved with the poverty report, but broadly agreed with its findings.

“A lot of the progress made in the prepandemic years in reducing poverty and child poverty has been undone with diverging unemployment rates by race and ethnicity,” Dr. Parrott said.

While the city said in October that it had recovered all the jobs lost during the pandemic, the positions that have returned have largely been in low-paying industries.

The retail sector, which pays around $54,000 a year and employs a large share of Black, Latino and Asian workers, has shed more jobs than any other industry, Dr. Parrott said. But the industry that is hiring the most employees, home health care, pays workers far less — around $32,100 a year. The median household income in New York City is about $75,000.

The average unemployment rate in 2023 among Black New Yorkers was 9.3 percent, more than three times higher than among white residents, according to Dr. Parrott.

“The Covid-19 pandemic took a disproportionate toll on our most vulnerable neighbors,” said Charles Lutvak, a spokesman for Mayor Eric Adams. But he pointed to a number of initiatives, including investments in a summer youth employment program and the expansion of the city’s earned-income tax credit, as signs of progress.

A full 25 percent of children in New York City lived in poverty in 2022, the highest rate since 2015, according to the report.

It was a sharp reversal from 2021, when the expansion of the federal child tax credit program cut child poverty in the city by 30 percent, said Chloe Sarnoff, the director of policy research and initiatives at Robin Hood.

The program temporarily increased the annual tax credit to up to $3,600 from $2,000 for each qualifying child under 6 years old, and up to $3,000 for older children. But Congress did not extend the benefits.

The need for public aid is clear at Grand Street Settlement, a nonprofit social services group in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn that has seen its food pantry lines swell to 2,800 people a month, up from 500 before the pandemic.

A growing child care crisis is fueling the rising poverty rate. “If we’re going to reduce poverty in the city of New York, we have to invest in child care,” said Robert Cordero, the group’s chief executive, adding that dwindling support from the city for its free preschool program is making it harder for parents to make ends meet.

Shavon Johnson, 30, who lives in public housing on the Lower East Side, is a recent widow who was fired in September from her job as a dog food cook, where she made $20 an hour. She said she was let go because she couldn’t get to work on time and still drop her 4-year-old son, Dominique, off at school.

Now she is enrolled in a medical assistant program in the hopes of becoming a nurse — a goal she couldn’t accomplish without the free day care program offered by Grand Street Settlement, which enables her to afford other necessities.

“I would be homeless” if not for the program, she said.

The report recommended permanently expanding public benefits such as the federal child tax credit and New York’s Empire State Child Tax Credit, a credit for state residents that was first passed in 2006.

Robin Hood said it supported expanding the Empire State tax credit to a maximum benefit of $1,000 a year, per child, up from $330, and eliminating income criteria that disproportionately leaves out Black and Hispanic families.

The changes could lift up to 76,000 children out of poverty, according to an analysis by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia.

The report also supported zoning reforms that would increase the supply of affordable housing, and an expansion of rental assistance vouchers to help keep low-income residents in their homes.

The City Council said on Wednesday that it planned to join a lawsuit ordering the city to comply with laws that would expand the voucher program, known as CityFHEPS. Mayor Adams has opposed such an expansion, arguing that it would be too costly.

Dulce Tellez, 22, is a teaching assistant for middle school students in Long Island City, Queens, where she is paid about $32,000 a year. After taxes, she said she cleared about $1,600 a month.

Every month she spends $1,000 for a babysitter and another $1,000 for her share of the rent in an apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where she lives with family. She is also chipping away at more than $4,000 in student debt.

Since her expenses exceed her monthly take-home pay, she sometimes picks up shifts at a gelato shop, or works extra hours at her school.

She estimates that 60 percent of the teaching assistants she works with have to take on hourly side jobs, including as security guards or hotel receptionists.

“It makes it seem normal,” she said. “But it shouldn’t be normal.”

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis .

Stefanos Chen is a Times reporter covering New York City’s economy. He previously covered real estate in the city for over a decade. More about Stefanos Chen

Maria Spiteri, 74, out shopping with her grandsons Harvey and Chesney in Tipton, April 2023.

‘It’s greed, that’s what it’s about’: documenting the UK’s cost of living crisis – photo essay

Photographer Kirsty Mackay’s project The Magic Money Tree explores the impact of poverty in the Black Country, South Shields and Bristol

  • The Magic Money Tree exhibition is at the New Art Gallery Walsall from 9 March to 14 July

I n 2023 I set out to document the UK’s cost of living crisis. I had a picture in my mind that what we were experiencing was the culmination of 13 years of Conservative governments. The work is titled The Magic Money Tree after Theresa May’s words on BBC Question Time: “There isn’t a magic money tree that suddenly delivers all the money everybody wants.”

People at a Bristol bus shelter with a poster reading ‘it’s greed, that’s what it’s about, greed’.

I spent a month visiting the North Bristol food bank, talking to people, listening to their experiences and gathering stories. We decided not to photograph people using the food bank but to take their experiences and write them large across bus shelters and pavements on the high street.

Drawn to working-class communities like the one I grew up in, I made work focusing on Tipton in the Black Country, South Shields in the north-east and my own community in south Bristol. I photographed what I found there and collaborated with people I got to know. Compact film cameras were handed out and I taught photography workshops for children and young people.

A girl near a parked car.

Photo taken by children on compact film cameras that Mackay handed out in Bristol and Tipton.

All together, photographs, drawings, paintings, banners and testimony tell the collective story of the cost of living crisis. It’s protest art in an election year.

At a food bank, I met people who jumped at the opportunity to pick up a camera and be creative. An older woman showed me the drawings she made as a child, some on wallpaper because she didn’t have anything else. I posted her some charcoal and she started drawing again at the age of 74.

Leighanne Jackson in her kitchen

Leighanne Jackson, 38, in her kitchen in South Shields, July 2023. Leighanne has five children, all of whom have spent time in care. ‘I am someone who doesn’t give up and won’t be defeated,’ she says. While I am photographing Leighanne, she shows me a photo on her phone of her hugging her youngest son, the last time she saw him. He is now adopted. ‘I had nothing. I gave [him] up for adoption. If I had had support, I could have kept him.’

A woman in Bristol with terminal cancer spoke to me. She was a single parent having to visit the food bank to feed her family. I was shown paintings made by Dave, stored in a church hall, about his experience of being evicted and then homeless. There was the older lady in South Shields that could no longer afford her favourite red leicester cheese, parents struggling to buy baby formula, a 17-year-old campaigning for universal free school meals and a woman who had lived in a tent for two years.

Lunch at the One for All drop-in centre

Above: free hot lunches at the One for All drop-in centre at St Hilda’s church, South Shields. Top left: volunteers Eunice Hodgson, Tia Leonard and Leighanne Jackson serve up hot lunches. Top right: Andrew: ‘I’ve been going days without any food, without any milk or anything like that, teas, coffees, etc. It’s one big struggle. I don’t think the government are doing enough to address the cost of living crisis. For my future I would just like everything to be sorted out and enough to survive on.’

By the summer of 2023, I had found my collaborators. For a month I visited the North Bristol food bank. One of the questions I asked people was: “Does the UK still have an adequate safety net?” Hazel told me: “At a very basic level there probably is a safety net but only for people that either fight to get the attention themselves or people that have somebody that will draw it to somebody’s attention. So there is a safety net but it’s got great big holes in it.”

I asked people what they had had for dinner the night before coming to the food bank. “Nothing for three days,” “a can of tuna”, “toast”, “a bowl of cereal”, “nothing, I only cook for my son”.

A mother and daughter walk along Owen Street in Tipton.

Above: a mother and daughter walk along Owen Street in Tipton. Right: looking towards Upper Church Lane in Tipton. Far right: Nikki and her four children wait for a bus in Tipton. Below: Poppy at the shopping centre in Tipton.

Looking towards Upper Church Lane, Tipton, April 2023.

By the end of the year I was asking: “To what extent is the UK a failed state?” Gareth told me: “I think the country is at breaking point. Especially with the NHS and mental health.” As I write this, even the IMF has advised the government to fund essential services over tax cuts this election year.

Biddick, South Shields, July 2023.

Biddick in South Shields.

To all the people who collaborated and shared their experiences, I am grateful. Mostly, I feel relieved to have made this work. If I were to try to make it this year, I’m not sure I would be able. I hear from colleagues that 2023 was the worst year for assignments. My personal finances have become increasingly precarious. My partner and I, both self-employed, are struggling with late payments as everyone struggles with increasing costs.

Michelle, 56, at home in Bristol, August 2023.

Michelle, 56, at home in Bristol, August 2023. ‘I can see it [the cost of living crisis] in the cupboards, hardly any food, no treats, no healthy eating. I like to eat from the ground. I like fresh produce. I just can’t do that these days. It’s just, it’s really, really hard. The freshest thing we can eat is potatoes. I came to the food bank three weeks ago. And I’ve come back again today because I’ve had to come back. I’ve just finished one job but I’m hoping to start another one in the next couple of weeks.’

It is said that politics is about choice. I witnessed the impact of choices made by our politicians on the lives of people across the country. For example, the choice not to raise Healthy Start vouchers so low-income families can afford baby milk and not be forced to water it down or steal it from the supermarket. Poverty , too, is a political choice.

The shelter of a Deliveroo rider in Victoria Park, Bristol, with apples and cereal bars placed on top by locals, April 2023.

The shelter of a Deliveroo rider in Victoria Park, Bristol, with apples and cereal bars placed on top by locals, April 2023.

Theresa May claimed there wasn’t magic money tree but in 2020 we saw the Bank of England use quantitative easing to print money to cover Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme and the universal credit uplift. As a result, poverty decreased during the pandemic, momentarily. Over the past 14 years we have seen the money go further away from those most in need.

Maria Spiteri out shopping with her grandsons Harvey and Chesney in Tipton

Top: Maria Spiteri, 74, out shopping with her grandsons Harvey and Chesney in Tipton, April 2023. ‘We’re only getting the same amount of money and then you have to meet the price of the food. We are being taken for granted. And you’re talking about greed, selfishness, and I don’t like it.’ Above left: Filwood, Bristol. Above right: Railway Street, Jarrow.

In his book Shattered Nation, Danny Dorling writes: “It is possible that in 2022 the UK became the most unequal country in Europe in terms of income inequality. Elsewhere on the continent, development in the opposite direction can be seen.”

A hat on the ground collects small change.

A woman gives her spare change to a man rough sleeping on East Street in Bristol.

The Magic Money Tree tells a story we all know. My hope is that this work will provide more detail for some people. That all these experiences, seen side by side, paint a true picture of this time. I hope it’s a story that is about to change.

The Magic Money Tree was made with the support of an Arts Council England, National Lottery project grant. The work was commissioned by Bristol photo festival and Historic England. The Magic Money Tree exhibition will open at the New Art Gallery Walsall on 9 March, running until 14 July .

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Black History Month Essay Contest 2024: Results

term paper on poverty

Jackson is an undergraduate student majoring in history and African and African-American studies at UC Davis. His winning essay explores the repercussions for Black Californians of a Supreme Court case about homelessness.

Read Jackson’s winning essay at CalMatters here:

Supreme Court homelessness case holds extra significance for Black Californians

Honorable Mentions

Rebekka Twine, ‘A Strength-Based Approach to Lifting Up Black Communities in California’

Anthony Zammikiel, ‘How Can We Reduce Racial & Economic Inequality In California? Reassess and Rethink Our Prison Systems’

Thank you to all the students who submitted such thoughtful and thought-provoking essays, and to Yousef Baig, commentary editor at CalMatters, for his support.

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  5. PDF Ending Global Poverty: Why Money Isn't Enough

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    poverty assessments, while NGOs opt for a rights-based view, seeing it as an end in itself, and thus calling for long, deep, and broad processes. Countries generally indicate lack of capacity to host and manage participation up front whereas some have built on existing processes. On the Information Sharing - Consultation - Collaboration -

  12. Poverty: A New Perspective on JSTOR

    Poverty itself is typically regarded as a lack of income, which in turn is related to poor housing, inadequate education, insufficient medical care, excessive fertility, unemployment, and many other depressing problems. Some areas, such as Appalachia, appear as massive concentrations of poverty.

  13. Poverty

    poverty, the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions.Poverty is said to exist when people lack the means to satisfy their basic needs. In this context, the identification of poor people first requires a determination of what constitutes basic needs. These may be defined as narrowly as "those necessary for survival" or as broadly as ...

  14. Extreme poverty: How far have we come, and how far do we still have to

    The UN's global poverty line is valuable because it has been successful in drawing attention to the terrible depths of extreme poverty of the poorest people in the world. 8. In a related essay, I focus on global poverty as defined by a higher poverty line. The big lesson of the last 200 years: Economic growth is possible, poverty is not ...

  15. Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States Term Paper

    In general, in 2014, the poverty rate for people under 18 years old was 21.1 percent (15.5 million), for those aged 18 to 64 - 13.5 percent (26.5 million), and for people above 65 years old - 10.0 percent (4.6 million). The poverty rate for different population groups is as follows: 42.1 percent of people in poverty were non-Hispanic Whites ...

  16. Why Poverty Persists in America

    Why Poverty Persists in America. A Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist offers a new explanation for an intractable problem. A mother and son living in a Walmart parking lot in North Dakota in 2012 ...

  17. Poverty Is a Choice

    That poverty threshold represents "a staggeringly low standard of living, well below any reasonable conception of a life with dignity," Alston argues—it is a catastrophic-destitution measure ...

  18. Poverty Essay for Students and Children

    500+ Words Essay on Poverty Essay. "Poverty is the worst form of violence". - Mahatma Gandhi. We can define poverty as the condition where the basic needs of a family, like food, shelter, clothing, and education are not fulfilled. It can lead to other problems like poor literacy, unemployment, malnutrition, etc.

  19. Term Paper about poverty

    Download Term Paper about poverty and more English Study Guides, Projects, Research in PDF only on Docsity! Poverty and inequality in the Philippines remains a big challenge as of October 2019 PH poverty rate seen falling below 20% starting 2020. -Philippine Daily Inquirer Lyniel Grace L. Sadje February 22, 2020 IN THE The Dark Side of the ...

  20. Term paper

    Title An Overview on the Poverty Status on the Society. II. Objectives -To discuss the status of poverty on the society. -To know and discuss the effects of poverty on the society solved -To know and discusses the causes of poverty on the society. -To discover and come up for ways to aide poverty on the society. III.

  21. The impact of poverty on early childhood

    Poverty affects young children's experiences directly. Parents have less money to meet children's material and social needs. The sharply rising costs of providing the basic essentials - food, warmth, lighting, housing costs, nappies, baby food, clothing - has created acute pressure for many families. Drawing on a survey of their service ...

  22. Poverty In The Philippines

    These have become the basis for social and economic development plans and programs of national and local governments. The objectives of this paper are to examine the poverty situation in the Philippines and to assess the country's poverty reduction strategy and policy... Words: 9270 - Pages: 38. Premium Essay.

  23. Poverty

    Essay On Poverty And Poverty...WEALTH AND POVERTY - JUDAISM The Jewish scholar of old viewed poverty as a great trouble and said that "he who is crushed by poverty is as though he were liable to every one of the sufferings of the world" (Midrash Rabbah, Exodus, 31:12). Poverty is a challenge and an opportunity for poor and most importantly ...

  24. Poverty Has Soared in New York, With Children Bearing the Brunt

    The national poverty rate in 2022 was 12.4 percent, up from 7.8 percent in 2021, the largest one-year jump on record, according to the United States Census Bureau.

  25. 'It's greed, that's what it's about': documenting the UK's cost of

    Photographer Kirsty Mackay's project The Magic Money Tree explores the impact of poverty in the Black Country, South Shields and Bristol In 2023 I set out to document the UK's cost of living ...

  26. Black History Month Essay Contest 2024: Results

    March 1st 2024. The Center for Poverty and Inequality Research is pleased to announce the results of its 2024 Black History Month Essay Contest.. The competition is open to all undergraduate and graduate students currently enrolled at UC Davis.