Economic conditions of female-headed households in Taiwan in comparison with the United States and Sweden

Abstract

This study investigated the economic conditions of female-headed households in Taiwan and compared them with those in the United States and Sweden in 2000. At the descriptive level, we investigated the socioeconomic backgrounds of the households, the rate of poverty, distributive effects of public and private transfers, and Gini coefficients at each stage of income distribution. We then conducted logistic regression analyses of the poverty rate at the last stage of income distribution. The major finding was that within the context of a small welfare state, Taiwan had the lowest poverty rate before transfers and the second lowest poverty rate after transfers of the three countries we studied. Moreover, at the last stage of income distribution, only two independent variables (education and work status of the household head) affected the poverty rate. We conclude that Taiwan, as one of the developmental welfare regimes in Asia, had created a different way of enhancing the economic wellbeing of female-headed households in the past, compared with the other two countries.

Keywords:

• female-headed households
• income status
• inter-country analysis

Notes

Note

1. Despite the high degree of economic development and income equality, the issue of gender equity still needs to be concerned. For example, women's wages in manufacturing as a percentage of men's wages was 66% in 2001, compared with that of Sweden (91% in 1999) and that of the United States (68% in 1990) (National Statistics of Taiwan, retrieved from http://www.stat.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=17841&ctNode=531).