Poverty and Public Policy

Policy makers are beginning to appreciate the constraints that unpaid care work imposes on both economic development and the empowerment of women in low-income countries. Empirical research on these topics is in its infancy but is already yielding significant results. This paper contextualizes and reviews recent research on unpaid care work in the Global South, […]

Using the federal government’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) — a more comprehensive metric than the official poverty measure, which counts only cash income — we calculate that the poverty rate has fallen by nearly half since 1967, largely due to the growing effectiveness of economic security programs such as Social Security, food assistance, and tax […]

Programs assisting low- and moderate-income people are not driving the nation’s long-term fiscal problems, contrary to assertions from some policymakers.  Despite this, the first two Trump budgets as well as recent congressional Republican budget plans — including the one for fiscal year 2019 recently approved by the House Budget Committee — target these programs for […]

The Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights visited the United States of America from 1 to 15 December 2017, in accordance with Human Rights Council resolution 35/19. The purpose of the visit was to report to the Council on the extent to which the Government’s policies and programmes relating to extreme poverty are […]