“ The Poor Will Always Be with You ”

(Matthew 26:11) Is poverty intractable? Have all advanced, industrial countries failed to reduce poverty? We can learn more about the presumed intractability of poverty by comparing advanced industrial countries to learn whether any of them have experienced recent, substantial declines in child poverty. This is just the tack taken by Wen-Hao Chen and Miles Corak in their analysis of changes in child poverty rates in 12 countries. Using the Luxembourg Income Study, they find that during the 1990s only three countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, and Norway—experienced substantial declines in child poverty. The decline in these countries is not attributable, moreover, to simple demographic changes, like average parental age or number of children per household. Although compositional changes in the labor market, such as rising female labor force participation, did contribute to a reduction in child poverty, an even more important source of this reduction, especially in Norway and the United Kingdom, was growing income transfers to families with children. The simple conclusion: Much headway against child poverty can be made by combining full employment policy with aggressive income transfers.