Has there been an adequate poverty reduction policy for single-parent households? An examination of the financial support for the single-parent and two-parent families with children in the Taiwanese context

ABSTRACT

Single-parent households have been the interest of policy since the 1990s in the Taiwanese context. As the impacts of the existing support to single-parent households remains unclear, this research is aimed at empirically comparing the distributional effects of policies on two-parent families and single-parent families with children, with the factors of gender, employment status and co-residence of the head of household being taken into account. Using data from Survey of Family Income and Expenditure for the years 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2019, the findings show that the economic gap between two-parent and single-parent families is growing. There have been clear signs of poverty mitigation for two-parent and single-parent families, showing that a general redistributive policy in Taiwan has been pursued to address poverty reduction for all families, but favour single-parent families. Based on the findings, policy suggestions are made regarding how to address single-parent families’ financial wellbeing.

KEYWORDS:

• Single-parent family
• two-parent family
• Taiwan
• poverty reduction policy effect
• poverty

Acknowledgments

The authors appreciate the assistance in providing data given by the The Centre for Survey Research of the Academia Sinica. The views expressed herein are the author’s own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Raw data were generated at Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan. Available from Survey Research Data Archive, Academia Sinica. doi: 10.6141/TW-SRDA-AA170015-1(1990); 10.6141/TW-SRDA-AA170025-1(2000); 10.6141/TW-SRDA-AA170035-1(2010); 10.6141/TW-SRDA-AA170044-1(2019).

Notes

1. The definition of single-parent family in the Population and Housing Census is ‘the family composition of one single parent (mother or father) and unmarried child(ren)'. The child(ren)'s age is not restricted to younger than 18 years old.

2. In the dataset of SFIE there are only 1 to 3.2% of cohabiting parents amongst the single-parent families during the last three decades. Moreover, cohabiting parents are eligible for single parents’ social assistance in the Taiwanese context due to their marital status remaining ‘single’ in the household registration. The impact from this group on poverty alleviation effects therefore could be relatively restricted.

3. Average disposable income is household disposable income divided by family size and adjusted by Consumer Price Index in Taiwan.

4. Policy effect is calculated as the difference in poverty rate and income when comparing them without and with government transfers, whilst the rate of change (percentage) is presented in parenthesis. It also applies to the changes in Table 6.

5. The SFIE did not cover the sub items of government transfer in 1990.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yi-Ting Lin

Yi-ting Lin is an assistant professor at Department of Social Work & Child Welfare, Providence University in Taiwan. Her research interest is gender, poverty, income inequality and the related social policy.

Hung-Ju Lai

Hung-ju Lai is an assistant professor at the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at National Chi Nan University. Her area of research covers from family social work in practice to social issues regarding child and women’s welfare.