Benefits of lofty goals: Britain halves its child poverty rate; US rate hits 20-year high

Child poverty has implications not just for hardship in the short-term, but also for long-term health and development. Children who experience poverty, particularly if it occurs early in their life or for an extended period, are at risk for a host of adverse health and developmental outcomes.

These outcomes impose costs not just for the children who experience them, but also for the rest of society. Children who do not complete high school, for example, are more likely to go on to become teen parents, to be unemployed, and to be incarcerated, all of which come with heavy social and economic costs.

In the United States, it is often thought that child poverty is an intractable problem. Clearly, the causes of child poverty are complex and multi-faceted, and there is no magic bullet that would eliminate poverty or its adverse effects. But there is evidence that policies that raise family incomes can lead to improved child and family well-being.

There is also evidence that home visiting, early childhood, nutrition, and other social programs, particularly if they are high-quality, can lead to improved outcomes for poor children.

However, given constrained budgets, funds to address child poverty, through whatever means, are necessarily limited. The recession has tightened not just families’ budgets but those of states and the federal government as well. Policymakers must consider carefully which policies are most likely to have an effect on child poverty and allocate their scarce resources wisely.

This paper describes recent efforts to reduce child poverty by a peer country, Britain, drawing on my book, Britain’s War on Poverty.

In 1999, then Prime Minister Tony Blair made a remarkable pledge to end child poverty, and over the subsequent decade, he and Gordon Brown (initially as Chancellor, and later as Prime Minister) carried out an ambitious and multi-faceted anti-poverty campaign. Although their New Labour government did not succeed in ending child poverty, they did make a substantial dent in it, reducing child poverty by more than half if measured in absolute terms as we do in the United States. Remarkably, their success in reducing child poverty continued even during the recession, as child poverty fell again in the last year, in sharp contrast to the pattern for the United States, where child poverty has now reached its highest level in 20 years.

Jane Waldfogel
Columbia University & London School of Economics

full Study: http://www.firstfocus.net/sites/default/files/TacklingPoverty.pdf