Volume 38, Number 2 (Spring) 2003
Jenkins, Stephen P., and Christian Schulter. 2003. "Why Are Child Poverty Rates Higher in Britain than in Germany? A Longitudinal Perspective." Journal of Human Resources 38(2):441-465.
We analyze why child poverty rates were much higher in Britain than in Western Germany during the 1990s, using a framework focusing on poverty transition rates. Child poverty exit rates were significantly lower, and poverty entry rates significantly higher, in Britain. We decompose these cross-national differences into differences in the prevalence of "trigger events" (changes in household composition, household labor market attachment, and labor earnings), and differences in the chances of making a poverty transition conditional on experiencing a trigger event. The latter are the most important in accounting for the cross-national differences in poverty exit and entry rates.
Stephen Jenkins is a professor at the University of Essex, research
professor at D/W Berlin, and research fellow at IZA Bonn and CHILD Turin.
Christian Schluter is a reader at the University of Southampton and research
associate at CASE, LSE. The paper uses data from public-use BHPS and GSOEP files
together with the 2001 edition of the Cross-National Equivalent File (data
available via htlp:// www.data-archive.ac.uk and http://www.human.comell.edu/pam/gsoep/gspindex.cftn).
The Stata code used for data extraction and analysis is available from Jenkins
beginning June 2003 through May
2006 from Jenkins (email:
stephenj@essex.ac.uk ). Revised version of a paper presented at the
Conference on Cross-National Comparative Research Using Panel Surveys, ISR,
University of Michigan Ann Arbor, October 7-26, 2000, and at a NZ Ministry of
Social Policy Conference, ISER (Essex), and CASE (LSE). Research funded by the
Anglo-German Foundation. We also benefited from ISER's core funding from the
U.K. Economic and Social Research Council and the University of Essex and CASE's
core funding from the ESRC. For helpful comments and suggestions, we thank our
conference discussant Dan Hamermesh, James Banks, Rich Burkhauser, Joachim
Frick, John Hills, Dean Lillard, John Micklewright, Lars Osberg, Lucinda Platt,
Gert Wagner, conference and seminar participants, and two anonymous referees.
© 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X