Poverty-Measurement Research Using the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the Survey of Income and Program Participation

The most recent comprehensive examination of poverty measurement in the United States was conducted by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Panel on Poverty and Family Assistance (Constance F. Citro and Robert T. Michael, 1995). In their report, the Panel recommended changing the definition of both the poverty thresholds and the resources that are used to measure poverty. In this paper we implement a number of the Panel's basic procedures, with slight modifications, to obtain experimental poverty rates for 1991 to 1996.' This paper presents poverty estimates using thresholds derived from the 1989-1991 Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX), and using family resources based on the 1991 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and the March 1992 Current Population Survey (CPS). The resulting experimental poverty rates are compared to those based on the official measure. While most previous work has examined the new poverty measure exclusively using the CPS, this paper presents, for the first time, estimates from the SIPP, the survey that the Panel recommended should become the official source of poverty resource measurement. Additional estimates from the CPS from 1992-1996 are presented in order to examine the behavior of these experimental poverty rates over time. Our findings reveal that changes in the poverty rates based on the official and the experimental measures are similar over time. We show that poverty rates using SIPP data are below those using the CPS. We also show that using the experimental poverty measure yields a poverty population that looks more like the total population in terms of various demographic and socioeconomic characteristics than does the poverty population based on the current official measure.