Volume 12, Number 3 (Summer) 1977
Smeeding, Timothy M. 1977. "The Antipoverty Effectiveness of In-Kind Transfers." Journal of Human Resources 12(3):360-378.
In recording its poverty statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau ignores the impact of in-kind transfers on the extent of poverty. In this paper, we estimate that when in-kind food, housing, and medical care transfers are counted and measured at their cash-equivalent value, and when Census income is adjusted for underreporting, federal taxes, and intrahousehold income-sharing, the 1972 poverty count and the poverty gap are halved. In addition, we find that in-kind transfers are relatively inefficient devices for reducing income poverty, delivering only about 31 cents of antipoverty effect per dollar of program cost.
The author is Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Utah. This investigation was supported in part by Grant No. 57811 from the Social Security Administration, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and has benefited from the comments of Robert Haveman, Edgar Browning, and the editor.
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