How long does poverty last

It is important to emphasize that the International Poverty Line is extremely low. Focusing on extreme poverty is important precisely because it captures those most in need. However, it is also important to point out that living conditions well above the International Poverty Line can still be characterized by poverty and hardship.

Accordingly, in this entry we will also discuss the global distribution of people below poverty lines that are higher than the International Poverty Line of 1. But relying only on higher poverty lines would mean that we are not keeping track of the very poorest people in the world and this is the focus of this entry. Poverty is a concept intrinsically linked to welfare — and there are many ways in which one can try to measure welfare.

But before we present the evidence, the introductory sub-section here provides a brief overview of the relevance of this approach. Global poverty is one of the very worst problems that the world faces today. The poorest in the world are often hungry , have much less access to education , regularly have no light at night, and suffer from much poorer health. To make progress against poverty is therefore one of the most urgent global goals. But with the onset of industrialization and rising productivity, the share of people living in extreme poverty started to decrease.

Accordingly, the share of people in extreme poverty has decreased continuously over the course of the last two centuries. This is surely one of the most remarkable achievements of humankind. Closely linked to this improvement in material living conditions is the improvement of global health and the expansion of global education that we have seen over these last two centuries.

We also discuss the link between education, health, and poverty in this entry. During the first half of the last century, the growth of the world population caused the absolute number of extremely poor people in the world to increase, even though the share of people in extreme poverty was going down.

After around , the decrease in poverty rates became so steep that the absolute number of people living in extreme poverty started falling as well.

This trend of decreasing poverty—both in absolute numbers and as a share of the world population—has been a constant during the last three decades. But as we highlight in the first section of this entry it is unfortunately not what we can expect for the coming decade. It is the fact that still almost every tenth person lives in extreme poverty and the slowing progress against extreme poverty that motivate this entry. How do we know the history of extreme poverty?

Economic growth — How do economies become more productive? Understanding how and when countries achieved economic growth is crucial to understand how some countries left the worst poverty behind and how other countries can follow.

Income inequality — It is not just the average income that matters for whether or not people live in poverty but how incomes are distributed. Global economic inequality — Our entry on the global distribution of incomes. Over the course of the last generation more than a billion people left the most destitute living conditions behind.

Can we expect this progress to continue over the coming decade? The world economy is growing. In less than a generation the value of the yearly global economic production has doubled. Increasing productivity around the world meant that many left the worst poverty behind.

More than a third of the world population now live on more than 10 dollars per day. Just a decade decade ago it was only a quarter. In absolute numbers this meant the number of people who live on more than 10 dollars per day increased by million in just the last 10 years.

This expansion of the global middle class went together with progress in reducing global poverty — no matter what poverty line you want to compare it with, the share of the world population below this poverty line declined. That is a very low poverty line and focusses on what is happening to the very poorest people on the planet.

The same international organizations that set the poverty line made it a global goal to end extreme poverty. The deadline for achieving this goal is Can we expect to achieve this? All expect some positive development — the number of people in extreme poverty is expected to continue to decline — but all also agree on the bad headline: the world is not on track to end extreme poverty by The chart shows the projection made by the development research team at the World Bank.

This projection answers the question of what would happen to extreme poverty trends if the economic growth of the past decade —15 continued until 5 The number of people in extreme poverty will stagnate at almost million.

This is not because it is not possible to end extreme poverty. In more than half of the countries of the world the share of the population in extreme poverty is now less than 3 percent.

In fact, the big success over the last generation was that the world made rapid progress against the very worst poverty. The number of people in extreme poverty has fallen from nearly 1. This was possible as economic growth reached more and more parts of the world. But after two decades of growth the share in extreme poverty more than halved in all these countries. Poverty was not concentrated in Africa until recently.

In more than a billion of the extremely poor lived in China and India alone. Since then those economies have grown faster than many of the richest countries in the world and did much to a reduction of global inequality.

Now it has shifted to Sub-Saharan Africa. The projections suggest the geographic concentration of extreme poverty is likely to continue. Poverty declined during the last generation because the majority of the poorest people on the planet lived in countries with strong economic growth.

This is now different. Development economists have emphasized this for some time: The very poorest people in the world did not see their material living conditions improve. This is an important reminder that one poverty line is not enough and we need to rely on several poverty lines — higher and lower than the international poverty line — to understand what is happening. We miss this if we only follow what is happening to the rapidly emerging global middle class or if we rely on global poverty lines that are not capturing what is happening to the poorest.

The projections suggest that over the coming decade the stagnation at the bottom will become very clear. These projections describe what we have to expect on current trends.

The second big lesson from the history of extreme poverty is that it is the growth of an entire economy that lifts individuals out of poverty. Key for ending extreme poverty globally will be that the poorest countries achieve the difficult task of economic growth. Social policy and direct household-level support, too, make an important difference. Even in very poor economies there is scope for targeted policies to support the very poorest. We know that it is possible; we have done it many times in the past.

The big success of the last generation was that global extreme poverty declined rapidly. But many are still very poor and progress against extreme poverty is urgently needed. There are many ways in which researchers and policymakers try to measure welfare. However, as we emphasize throughout, this is only one of many aspects that we need to consider when discussing poverty. In other entries in Our World In Data we discuss evidence that allows tracking progress in other aspects of welfare that are not captured by standard economic indicators.

This broad perspective on global development is at the heart of our publication. The practice of measuring welfare via consumption and income has a long tradition in economics.

Many classic textbooks and papers provide details regarding the conceptual framework behind this for a basic technical overview see Deaton and Zaidi ; 12 and by now there is also an extensive literature discussing various important points of contention see Ch 2.

Alternative starting points for measuring welfare include subjective views e. These alternative notions of welfare play an important role in academia and policy, and it is necessary to bear in mind that they are interrelated. Indeed, as we explain below , many of these concepts indirectly enter the methodology used by the World Bank to measure poverty; for example, by helping set the poverty lines against which monetized consumption is assessed.

The most important conclusion from the evidence presented in this entry is that extreme poverty, as measured by consumption, has been going down around the world in the last two centuries. But why should we care? Is it not the case that poor people might have less consumption but enjoy their lives just as much—or even more—than people with much higher consumption levels? One way to find out is to simply ask. Subjective views are an important way of measuring welfare.

This is what the Gallup Organization did. The Gallup World Poll asked people around the world what they thought about their standard of living—not only about their income.

The following chart compares the answers of people in different countries with the average income in those countries. It shows that, broadly speaking, people living in poorer countries tend to be less satisfied with their living standards. This suggests that economic prosperity is not a vain, unimportant goal but rather a means for a better life.

The correlation between rising incomes and higher self-reported life satisfaction is shown in our entry on happiness. This is more than a technical point about how to measure welfare. It is an assertion that matters for how we understand and interpret development. First, the smooth relationship between income and subjective well-being highlights the difficulties that arise from using a fixed threshold above which people are abruptly considered to be non-poor.

In reality, subjective well-being does not suddenly improve above any given poverty line. Therefore, while the International Poverty Line is useful for understanding the changes in living conditions of the very poorest of the world, we must also take into account higher poverty lines reflecting the fact that living conditions at higher thresholds can still be destitute.

As the data shows, there is just no empirical evidence that would suggest that living with very low consumption levels is romantic. A disregard for or disinterest in poverty estimates that are calculated on the basis of low consumption and income levels is partly explained by the fact that it can be very difficult for people to imagine what it is like to live with very little.

Even economists who think a lot about income and poverty find it difficult to understand what it means to live on a given income level. The most straightforward way to measure poverty is to set a poverty line and to count the number of people living with incomes or consumption levels below that poverty line.

This is the so-called poverty headcount ratio. Measuring poverty by the headcount ratio provides information that is straightforward to interpret; by definition, it tells us the share of the population living with consumption or incomes below some minimum level. The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than 1.

In the map we show available estimates of the extreme poverty headcount ratio, country by country. The map shows the latest available estimates by default, but with the slider immediately below the map you can explore changes over time. Estimates are again expressed in international dollars int. This means that figures account for different price levels in different countries, as well as for inflation.

Hence, it is both interesting and important to measure poverty with higher poverty lines. The World Bank also reports poverty headcount ratios using a higher line at 3. Measuring poverty through headcount ratios does not capture the intensity of poverty—individuals with consumption levels marginally below the poverty line are counted as being poor just as individuals with consumption levels much further below the poverty line.

The most common way to deal with this is to measure the shortfall from the poverty line, the amount of money required by a poor household to reach the poverty line. It tells us the fraction of the poverty line that people are missing, on average, in order to escape poverty. There is a strong correlation between the incidence of poverty and the intensity of poverty: sub-Saharan Africa, where the share of people below the poverty line is higher, is also the region where people tend to be furthest below the poverty line.

Interestingly, the correlation is very strong, but is far from perfect. As discussed above, the poverty gap index is often used in policy discussions because it has an intuitive unit percent mean shortfall that allows for meaningful comparisons regarding the relative intensity of poverty. The two visualizations show the absolute yearly monetary value of the poverty gap, for the world top chart and country by country bottom chart.

The numbers come from multiplying the poverty gap index, by both the poverty line and total population. As we can see, the monetary value of the global poverty gap today is about half of what it was a decade ago.

This shows that in recent years we have substantially reduced both the incidence and the intensity of poverty. Below we summarize how poverty has changed over the last two centuries. How historians know about the history of poverty is the focus of a longer text that you find here: How do we know the history of extreme poverty? The World Bank only publishes data on extreme poverty from onwards, but researchers have reconstructed information about the living standards of the more distant past.

The seminal paper on this was written by Bourguignon and Morrison in In this paper, the two authors reconstruct measures of poverty as far back as The poverty line of 1. This difference in the definition of poverty should be kept in mind when comparing the following graph to those discussed in other sections of this entry.

In , the vast majority of people lived in extreme poverty and only a tiny elite enjoyed higher standards of living. Economic growth over the last years completely transformed our world, with the share of the world population living in extreme poverty falling continuously over the last two centuries.

This is even more remarkable when we consider that the population increased 7-fold over the same time. In a world without economic growth, an increase in the population would result in less and less income for everyone. A 7-fold increase in the world population would be potentially enough to drive everyone into extreme poverty. Yet, the exact opposite happened. In a time of unprecedented population growth, we managed to lift more and more people out of the extreme poverty of the past.

It is very difficult to compare income or consumption levels over long periods of time because the available goods and services tend to change significantly, to the extent where even completely new goods and services emerge.

This point is so significant that it would not be incorrect to claim that every person in the world was extremely poor in the 19th century. Nathan Rothschild was surely the richest man in the world when he died in But the cause of his death was an infection—a condition that can now be treated with antibiotics sold for less than a couple of cents.

Today, only the very poorest people in the world would die in the way that the richest man of the 19th century died. This example is a good indicator of how difficult it is to judge and compare levels of prosperity and poverty, especially for the distant past.

The trend over time becomes more clear if one compares the availability of necessities like food, housing, clothing, and energy. As more and more countries industrialized and increased the productivity of work, their economies started to grow and poverty began to decline. According to the estimates by Bourguignon and Morrison—shown in the visualization—only a little more than a quarter of the world population was not living in poverty by From onwards, we have better empirical data on global extreme poverty.

The Bourguignon and Morrison estimates for the past are based on national accounts and additional information on the level of inequality within countries. The data from onwards come from the World Bank, which bases their estimates on household surveys. See below for more on where historical poverty estimates come from. Since then, the share of extremely poor people in the world has declined very fast—in fact, faster than ever before in world history.

There is also an interactive version of this visualization here. We have seen that the chance of being born into extreme poverty has declined dramatically over the last years. But what about the absolute number of people living in extreme poverty? The visualization combines the information on the share of extreme poverty shown in the last chart, with the number of people living in the world.

For the years prior to , we use the mid-point of the estimates from Bourguignon and Morrison as shown in the previous chart; from , we use the World Bank estimates. As we can see, in there were just under 1. Over the next years, the decline of poverty was not fast enough to offset the very rapid rise of the world population, so the number of non-poor and poor people increased.

Since around , however, we are living in a world in which the number of non-poor people is rising, while the number of extremely poor people is falling. According to the estimates shown here, there were close to 2 billion people living in extreme poverty in the early s, and there were million people living in extreme poverty in In , there were 1. With a reduction to million in , this means that on average, every day in the 25 years between and , ,00 fewer people were living in extreme poverty.

Unfortunately, the slow developments that entirely transform our world never make the news, and this is the very reason why we are working on this online publication. In the recent past we saw the fastest reduction of the number of people in extreme poverty ever.

What our history shows us is that it is possible to reduce extreme poverty it is on us to end extreme poverty as soon as possible. We have already pointed out that in the thousands of years before the beginning of the industrial era, the vast majority of the world population lived in conditions that we would call extreme poverty today. Productivity levels were low and food was scarce— material living standards were generally very low.

The first countries in which people improved their living conditions were those that industrialized first. The chart shows the decline of extreme poverty in these countries. These estimates come from Ravallion Progress was made at a fast pace—in some cases even at a constant pace. We can definitely end extreme poverty in low income countries, and we can do it soon.

Other countries have done it before. Second, we can also see from this chart that despite remarkable progress, in some rich countries—notably the United States—a fraction of the population still lives in extreme poverty. This is the result of exceptionally high income inequality. See below for more on extreme poverty in rich countries. Above, we provided an overview of recent poverty trends country by country. Here we focus on trends from a regional perspective.

The first chart provides regional estimates of poverty counts — the total number of people living below the International Poverty Line in each world region. The second chart provides regional estimates of poverty rates — the share of population in each region living below the International Poverty Line. As we can see, globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty fell by more than 1 billion during the period; from 1. On average, the number of people living in extreme poverty declined by 47 million every year since On any average day the number of people in extreme poverty declined by , people.

In Sub-Saharan Africa however the number of people in extreme poverty has increased and we explained at the beginning of this entry various projections expect that extreme poverty will be increasingly concentrated in Africa. The following chart shows that the share of people living in extreme poverty has fallen even faster.

The International Poverty Line that international organizations like the UN rely on corresponds to 1. Because of this it is important to measure poverty not just by one very low poverty line, but many other poverty lines as well. The visualization shows the global income distribution in and below we will look at a longer time period.

It is of course also adjusted for price changes over time inflation. What this distribution shows is that global income inequality is extremely high. To read the chart below, choose a level of annual income on the y-axis and then use the blue line and the red line to find the corresponding share of the world population living with less than that income on the x-axis. The first thing that this chart shows is that a large share of the world population lives on very low incomes.

The median income in was 2, int. If you want to consider a poverty line higher than the International Poverty Line , you could chose a line of int. This was a decline of 20 percentage points in one decade relative to this higher poverty line. If you think the international poverty line should be much higher and should instead be 4, int. A decline of 13 percentage points in a decade.

But it is clear that the world has made progress against it. What this chart shows is that, no matter what global poverty line you choose, the share of people below that poverty line has declined. The study by Mauro and Hellebrandt 21 on which the above chart is based only has data from onwards.

But there is some good data that allows us to go further back in time, as well as looking at absolute numbers of people in poverty rather than shares. Progress against a poverty line of int. Until a decade decade ago it was only a quarter. The majority of the world population is still very poor. What the cutoff for extreme poverty is helpful for is to focus the attention to those who are the very poorest. This would not be possible if we would only rely on much higher poverty thresholds.

A poverty line of int. The chart below answers the question of how the number of people below different poverty lines is changing. And the number of people above the poverty line has increased rapidly.

The number of people who live on more than 10 dollars per day increased by million in the last 10 years. The world is making progress against all poverty lines and with rapid growth in many middle income countries we can hope that this progress against poverty relative to high poverty lines will continue.

But our focus should be on those in the very worst poverty. In recent decades, the share in extreme poverty has declined faster than ever before in human history. This post asks whether such remarks are true. Is the substantial decline of global poverty only due to the poverty decline in China? First, let us look at the historical evolution of poverty in China. Shown in dark blue is the declining share of the Chinese population living below the International Poverty Line 1. The decline from almost every Chinese person living in extreme poverty to almost no Chinese people living in extreme poverty is of course an exceptional achievement.

But is this the entire story of falling global poverty? To find the answer we recalculated the share of people living in extreme poverty globally and disregarded China entirely — so that we compare a planet with China to a planet without China. The chart shows the results. In blue is the decline of global poverty, in red the decline of poverty excluding China. We see that the reduction of global poverty was very substantial even when we do not take into account the poverty reduction in China.

What is also interesting to see in the chart is that until , the inclusion of China increased the share of the world population living in extreme poverty; but since then, this has reversed, and the inclusion of China is now reducing the global poverty headcount ratio. We care about people — not about countries, and since more than every 5th person in the world is Chinese , it is a really important achievement for the world that extreme poverty has decreased so substantially in China.

Despite the clear evidence, many people are not aware of the fact that extreme poverty is declining across the world. The chart shows the perceptions that survey-respondents in the UK have regarding global achievements in poverty reductions. While the share of extremely poor people has fallen faster than ever before in history over the last 30 years, the majority of people in the UK thinks that the opposite has happened, and that poverty has increased.

The extent of ignorance in the UK is particularly bad if we take into account that the shown result corresponds to a population with a university degree. See the Gapminder Ignorance Project for more evidence.

Not only in the UK are many wrongly informed about how poverty is changing globally. The youngest individuals in our sample were born in and were age 15 at the time of the interview. The oldest individuals were 35 at the time of the last interview. Individuals with poverty information available for fewer than half of the study years were excluded from the analysis. Sample attrition has been modest and has not generally affected the representativeness of the sample.

Nonetheless, sampling weights that accounted for attrition were employed in all analyses. We use this new strategy called PSID-4 by the authors to construct poverty indicators for each individual for each year of their childhood ages birth to 15 years old and for the ages of 20, 25, 30, and 35 years old.

All results presented below are weighted using the PSID individual-level core sample weights. Exposure to poverty during childhood varies widely see Figure 1.

Most children 65 percent never experience poverty between the ages of birth and 15 years old. Of those who are poor at some point during their childhood and early adolescence, most 69 percent are poor for less than half of that time.

However, one in 10 children spend at least half of childhood living in poverty and 6. On average, a child spends nearly 14 percent of his or her childhood living in poverty. Children who were ever poor during childhood spend an average of 47 percent of childhood living in poverty. African-American children and younger children are more likely to experience poverty than white children and older children. While nearly three-quarters of white children never experience poverty during their childhood, fewer than one-third of African-American children are never poor see Figure 1.

Nearly one-quarter of African-American children live in poverty for more than three-fourths of their childhood and more than one-third are poor for at least half of their childhood. On average, a white child spends only 8. By contrast, an African-American child is poor for nearly two-fifths of childhood on average. For both white and African-American children, the chances of being poor declines slowly but steadily between early and late childhood see Figure 2.

Adults who were poor during childhood are much more likely to be poor in early and middle adulthood than are those who were never poor see Table 1. Few adults who did not experience poverty during childhood are poor in early and middle adulthood. At ages 20, 25, and 30, only four to five percent of those adults who were never poor during their childhood live in poverty.

At age 35, less than one percent are poor. Poverty rates for adults who were poor during childhood are much higher, especially for those individuals with high levels of exposure to poverty during childhood.

For adults who experienced low-to-moderate levels of poverty during childhood one to 50 percent of childhood years , 12 to 13 percent are poor at ages 20 and 25 and seven to eight percent are poor at ages 30 and For adults who experienced moderate-to-high levels of poverty during childhood 51 to percent of childhood years , between 35 percent and 46 percent are poor throughout early and middle adulthood. At comparable levels of exposure to poverty during childhood, African-Americans are more likely than whites to be poor throughout early and middle adulthood.

For example, while 0. At higher levels of poverty exposure during childhood, the differences between African-American and white poverty rates in adulthood are starker. At low-to-moderate levels of poverty exposure during childhood, four to 11 percent of whites are poor in early and middle adulthood, but 19 to 30 percent of African-Americans are poor. At moderate-to-high levels of childhood poverty exposure, 42 to 51 percent of African-Americans are poor as adults, but only 25 to 40 percent of whites are poor.

African-Americans are, therefore, doubly disadvantaged relative to whites. On one hand, they have greater exposure to poverty during childhood than whites. On the other hand, at similar levels of exposure to poverty during childhood, they are more likely to be poor as adults. Our examination of PSID data indicates that while most children never experience poverty, 35 percent of children born between and experienced poverty between birth and age We also find that African-American children are more likely to experience poverty than are white children.

These results have implications for adults: Individuals who were poor during childhood are more likely to be poor as adults than are those who were never poor, and this is especially true for African-Americans. Though there is considerable upward mobility in the United States, escaping poverty is difficult, and racial disadvantages mean that mobility out of poverty for African-Americans is far more difficult than it is for whites. Duncan, Greg J. Consequences of Growing Up Poor. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Teachman, Jay D. Journal of Family Issues 29 6 : Haveman, Robert; Wolfe, Barbara. Yeung, W. Child Development. Corcoran, Mary. Annual Review of Sociology Ashenfelter, Orley; Card, David eds. This reality is no accident.

It is the result of concerted efforts over the past 50 years to decentralize and defund programs such as SNAP, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance UI as well as a prevailing false narrative that insists that the jobless and others facing hardship are undeserving of comprehensive government support. One particularly egregious example is the federal program formerly known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children AFDC , a New Deal-era cash assistance program targeted to low-income children.

When the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act converted it to a more restrictive—and underfunded—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families TANF block grant to supposedly encourage work, participation in the program decreased dramatically.

Such circumstances exist because economic inequality is inextricably linked to other structural inequities in incarceration, education, housing, health, and more. For example, more than 1 in 10 children live in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, and African American and American Indian children are seven times more likely than their white counterparts to live in neighborhoods that, due to histories of redlining and chronic underinvestment, are less likely to have job opportunities for parents and safe places to play.

The same forces that created segregated neighborhoods of concentrated poverty have also resulted in the segregation of primarily low-income students and students of color into underresourced schools that struggle to meet their needs.

In the absence of a strong federal role, the vast majority of states have distributed educational funds through systems that do not target schools with higher rates of student poverty. In some ways, the institutions charged with supporting children and keeping them safe have contributed to cycles of criminalization and hardship instead. For example, disciplinary practices in American schools disproportionately target low-income, disabled, and Black students and can ultimately lead to incarceration in what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

These examples of the many structural inequities in U. Policymakers need to make sure every child has access to the basics—food, housing, and health care—and ease the financial burdens that families face when raising children. The millions of children living in poverty right now do not have the luxury of waiting for changes that can take decades to fully realize. Thus the push for more immediate assistance must be paired with a forward-thinking strategy to fix policies that promote inequality, limit economic mobility, and perpetuate marginalization.

The following recommendations are just some of the policy solutions that can contribute to ending child poverty in the United States. Both programs have been tied to positive outcomes for mothers and infants, and children with access to the programs can experience significant health gains and improved long-term health, educational, and economic outcomes. Despite the clear advantage of funding and supporting nutrition assistance programs, 58 they have been the target of regulatory attacks 59 and budget cuts.

Lawmakers must also ensure that the WIC program is fully funded and that all of its benefits, including those beyond food assistance such as breastfeeding counseling, are available to all eligible families. Another vital program for ensuring that children are guaranteed the food they need, the National School Lunch and Breakfast programs serve almost 30 million students each day. Those with family incomes at or below percent of the federal poverty level receive free lunch; those with incomes between percent and percent of the poverty level pay a reduced price 30 cents for breakfast and 40 cents for lunch ; and all other students pay full price for their meals.

Instead of a means-tested program that can add burdens for both families and school administrators, with complicated paperwork for applications and reimbursements, lawmakers should enact a universal free lunch program at public schools and child care centers. Three-quarters of very low-income families pay more than half of their incomes on rent; 67 in , almost 1. To ensure that all children and their families are housed, policymakers must invest in fair and equitable housing policies.

The program is intended to help very low-income people rent, lease, or purchase safe housing in the neighborhoods of their choice, but its potential is marred in part by widespread discrimination against voucher holders and a yearslong waiting list.

As a result, millions of low-income families are often left with limited options and impossibly long waits for a voucher to become available.

Children in low-income families tend to have worse health outcomes than other kids, with even short stays in poverty being associated with higher rates of asthma, malnutrition, trauma, and other chronic diseases. Health care costs also drive millions of families into poverty, forcing them to make difficult financial trade-offs to afford care.

The federal government must ensure that all children, no matter their household incomes, have access to comprehensive and affordable health care. Doing so would not only create better health outcomes and future opportunities for those children but would also remove a financial burden for parents.

And for the many low-wage workers who do not receive health care through an employer, stable coverage for their children is even harder to find. Recent attacks on Medicaid and CHIP have increased bureaucratic burdens, narrowed eligibility, and discouraged immigrant families from applying even when eligible—all of which contribute to increasing rates of uninsurance.

Future changes to the health care system must ensure stable, affordable coverage for low-income children and provide early and consistent screening, diagnostic, and treatment services so that children have access to the comprehensive and preventive health services that they need.

While UI programs are intended to help families make up for lost wages, they are often characterized by state variations, burdensome application processes, and inadequate benefit amounts. Despite its flaws, there is proven evidence that the program works. In , during the Great Recession, UI benefits lifted almost 1 million children out of poverty.

The United States is the only industrialized country without a national paid leave program, leaving many low-wage and part-time workers—who are disproportionately women—without a viable option for paid time off in times of need.

A permanent national paid sick leave law would help workers protect their health and care for sick family members without risking their livelihood. A permanent national paid family and medical leave program, with comprehensive reasons for leave and a progressive wage replacement, would allow workers to take time off to welcome a new child or care for themselves and their families during illness without experiencing a massive decline in income or losing their job completely.

According to a Congressional Budget Office analysis, more than , children would be lifted over the federal poverty line by increasing the minimum wage alone. For poor families, paying for child care can amount to almost one-third of their already limited budgets. Investing in affordable, high-quality child care and universal preschool is a smart decision—not just for the economy and families as a whole but also as a strategy to reduce child poverty in the coming years.

Study after study has shown that cash transfer programs can make a big difference in alleviating poverty. These programs allow people to spend the money where it makes the most sense for their families rather than dictating how or when they can use it. Although it is meant to help offset the cost of raising children, the phase-in structure of the credit means it intentionally excludes the lowest-income families who stand to benefit the most. To strengthen the child tax credit, lawmakers must pass legislation to increase the benefit and make it fully refundable, disbursed monthly rather than as a one-time lump sum, and indexed to inflation.

Most importantly, they must eliminate the minimum earnings requirement to ensure that the most vulnerable children are able to receive the benefit. This would allow the credit to function much like a child allowance that offers cash benefits to families to help them raise children, a policy used in countries that have more successfully reduced child poverty such as Australia, Germany, and Canada.