Family policies and single parent poverty in 18 OECD countries, 1978–2008

Abstract

This study examined to what extent family policies differently affect poverty among single-parent households and two-parent households. We distinguished between reconciliation policies (tested with parental leave and the proportion of unpaid leave) and financial support policies (tested with family allowances). We used data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database, covering 519,825 households in 18 OECD countries from 1978 to 2008, combined with data from the Comparative Family Policy Database. Single parents face higher poverty risks than coupled parents, and single mothers more so than single fathers. We found that employment reduces poverty, particularly for parents in professional occupations and for coupled parents who are dual earners. Longer parental leave, a smaller proportion of unpaid leave, and higher amounts of family allowances were associated with lower poverty among all households with children. Parental leave more effectively facilitated the employment of single mothers, thereby reducing their poverty more than among couples and single fathers. We found some evidence that family allowances reduced poverty most strongly among single fathers. An income decomposition showed that family allowances reduce poverty among two-parent households with up to 3 percentage points, and among single-parent households (mothers and fathers) up to 13 percentage points.

En este estudio se analizó hasta qué punto las políticas familiares afectan de modo diferente la pobreza entre los hogares monoparentales y los hogares biparentales. Hicimos distinción entre políticas de reconciliación (probadas con permiso parental y la proporción de excedencia sin derecho a sueldo) y las políticas de apoyo monetario (probadas con subsidios familiares). Para este estudio se utilizaron datos del Luxembourg Income Study Database, que abarca 519.825 hogares en 18 países de la OCDE entre 1978 y 2008, combinados con la base de datos Comparative Family Policy. Las familias monoparentales se enfrentan a mayores riesgos de pobreza que las parejas, y las madres de familia monoparental más que los padres de familia monoparental. Determinamos que el empleo reduce la pobreza, en particular en los casos de padres con ocupaciones profesionales y en parejas de doble ingreso. Un permiso parental más prolongado, una proporción menor de excedencia sin derecho a sueldo y mayores montos de subsidios familiares fueron asociados con menores niveles de pobreza entre todos los hogares con niños. El permiso parental facilitó con mayor efectividad el empleo de las madres de familia monoparental, lo que de este modo redujo su pobreza más que en el caso de parejas y padres de familia monoparental. Encontramos algunas evidencias de que los subsidios familiares redujeron la pobreza con más fuerza en los casos de padre de familia monoparental. Ulteriores análisis, sobre la base de una descomposición de ingresos, demostraron que los subsidios familiares reducen la pobreza entre los hogares biparentales, hasta en 3 puntos porcentuales y entre los hogares de familia monoparental (madres y padres) hasta en 13 puntos porcentuales.

Keywords:

• single parents
• poverty
• family policy
• social investment
• parental leave
• family allowance
• employment

Palabras claves:

• hogares monoparentales
• pobreza
• política familiar
• licencia familiar
• asignación familiar

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the insightful comments by the LIS team, attendants of ‘Introduction to LIS' and ‘Should Welfare States Target Single-Parent Families?' workshops at the Work Family Researchers Network 2014 conference, and in particular for the contributions of Janet Gornick, and the editor and anonymous reviewers of Community, Work, & Family.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Laurie Maldonado is a doctoral candidate in Social Welfare at UCLA and is a predoctoral scholar at LIS (Luxembourg Income Study). She is the recipient of the Ph.D. grant awarded by the Fonds National Recherche of Luxembourg, which supports her research that examines the consequences of social policy on the lives of single parents and their families in the USA and across countries. Laurie co-authored, with Tim Casey from Legal Momentum, ‘Worst Off: Single-Parent Families in the United States: A Cross-National Comparison of Single-Parenthood in the U.S. and Sixteen Other High-Income Countries'.

Rense Nieuwenhuis is a sociologist interested in how the interplay between social policies and demographic trends gives rise to economic inequalities. His publications appeared in the Journal of Marriage and Family and the European Sociological Review, among other journals. In 2014, he obtained a Ph.D. (‘Cum Laude’) from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and currently he is an assistant professor at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI).

ORCID

Rense Nieuwenhuis http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6138-0463

Notes

1. The USA does not have a national family allowance program, however, the USA does provide federal and state income tax credits to many working low-income families (the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC)). These tax credits are accounted for in our data.

Additional information

Funding

Parts of this research were supported by the AFR Ph.D. Grant 4039120 of the Fonds National Recherche of Luxembourg.