Pathways
a magazine on poverty, inequality, and social

policySpecial Issue 2016

STATE
UNION
of
the

The Poverty and Inequality Report2016Funding from the Elfenworks Foundationand the U.S. Department of Health andHuman Services gratefully acknowledged.
The contents of this issue are solely the
responsibility of the authors and do not

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necessarily represent the official views of the
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Stanford Center on
Poverty and Inequality
www.inequality.com

table of contents
3 Executive Summary
David B. Grusky, Marybeth J. Mattingly,
and Charles E. Varner
10 Labor Markets
Michael Hout
15 Poverty
Janet C. Gornick and Markus Jäntti
25 Safety Net
Karen Jusko
32 Income Inequality
Jonathan Fisher and Timothy M. Smeeding
39 Wealth Inequality
Gabriel Zucman
45 Education
Anna K. Chmielewski and Sean F. Reardon
51 Economic Mobility
Miles Corak58 Health
Jason Beckfield and Katherine Morris
65 Residential Segregation
Daniel T. Lichter, Domenico Parisi,
and Helga de ValkPATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

Pathways
a magazine on poverty, inequality, and social policy
Special Issue 2016

SENIOR EDITORSDavid GruskyCharles Varner
Marybeth Mattingly
COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER

Stephanie Garlow
ART DIRECTOR

Robin Weiss

COPY EDITOR

Liz Hogan-Stalnaker
ADMINISTRATOR

Alice ChouEDITORIAL BOARD

Kenneth Arrow, Stanford University
Peter Bearman, Columbia University
David Card, University of California ­at Berkeley
Joshua Cohen, Stanford University
Dalton Conley, New York University
Greg Duncan, University of California
at Irvine
Kathryn Edin, Johns Hopkins University
Paula England, New York University
Robert Frank, Cornell University
Mark Granovetter, Stanford University
Robert Hauser, National ResearchCouncilMichael Hout, New York University
Jon Krosnick, Stanford University
Glenn Loury, Brown University
Hazel Markus, Stanford University
Douglas Massey, Princeton University
Susan Mayer, University of Chicago

Charles Murray, American EnterpriseInstitute for Public Policy Research
Katherine Newman, Universityof Massachusetts
Thomas Piketty, Paris School of
Economics
Woody Powell, Stanford University
Barbara Reskin, University ofWashington
Richard Saller, Stanford University
William Julius Wilson, Harvard
University
STANFORD CENTER ON POVERTY
AND INEQUALITY

Building 370, 450 Serra Mall,
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2029
Tel: 650-724-6912 Fax: 650-736-9883
Email: inequality@stanford.edu
Website: www.inequality.com

The Stanford Center on Poverty
and Inequality is a program of theInstitute for Research in the Social
Sciences. Funding from the Elfenworks
Foundation and the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services (Office of
the Assistant Secretary for Planning and
Evaluation) is gratefully acknowledged.
The research reported here wasfurther supported by the Russell Sage
Foundation. The contents are solely
the responsibility of the authorsand do not necessarily represent theofficial views of the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services Officeof the Assistant Secretary for Planningand Evaluation, Substance Abuse andMental Health Services Administration,or the Stanford Center on Poverty andInequality.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

the poverty andinequality report
The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality

DAVID B. GRUSKY, MARYBETH J. MATTINGLY,AND CHARLES E. VARNER

T

he Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality (CPI), one of the country’s threefederally-funded poverty centers, is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to monitoring trends in poverty and inequality, examining what is driving those trends, anddeveloping science-based policy on poverty and inequality. We present here our third
annual report examining the “state of the union” on poverty, inequality, and labor market outcomes.
The purpose of establishing this annual series of reports is to ensure that critical facts
on poverty and inequality enjoy the same visibility as other indicators of the country’s health. There are of course all manner of analyses that take on separately such
issues as poverty, employment, income inequality, health inequality, economic mobility, or educational access. This report instead provides a unified analysis that brings
together evidence across these and other domains and thus allows for a comprehensive assessment of where the country stands.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

4

executive summary

In prior reports, we have provided this comprehensive assessment by (a) examining the takeoff in U.S. income inequality andother long-term trends in U.S. poverty, inequality, and labormarket outcomes (2014 State of the Union), and (b) examining the redistribution, labor market, and economic mobility
profiles of the 50 U.S. states (2015 State of the Union). For
our 2016 report, we are presenting a cross-national analysis,
as doing so allows us to revisit often-parochial debates about
U.S. poverty and inequality from an especially revealing comparative standpoint. The key questions in play are accordingly
straightforward: Is the U.S. truly an outlier when it comes topoverty and inequality outcomes? Is it instead a standardissue “liberal regime” with outcomes that are roughly similar
to those of other liberal welfare regimes? Are there particulardomains in which the U.S. stands out as especially equal or
unequal?
For each of the nine domains examined here, some of theworld’s leading experts have been asked to take on just suchquestions, the objective being to crisply characterize the best
and most current evidence available. In Table 1, we have listed
the indicators used to characterize each country’s poverty
and inequality profile, and we have also provided the mean,
minimum, and maximum for each indicator. This table neither includes all the indicators or all the countries examined in
the chapters themselves. In each of the domains, the authors

TABLE 1.

were asked to exploit the best available data, and there isaccordingly some variability across chapters in the countries
covered. For the purposes of this summary, we have selecteda core set of countries for which a relatively wide range ofindicators are available, thus allowing us to effect a broad
summary comparison.
As a further summary of our results, Table 2 ranks eachcountry within each of the six domains in Table 1, with thisdomain-specific ranking computed by averaging a country’s
ranking across the indicators comprising a domain. We havealso provided the overall ranking of each country by averaging across the domain-specific rankings. In Tables 3 and 4,
an analogous set of results is presented for a wider set ofcountries, results that are based on the restricted subset ofindicators that is available when cross-national coverage isbroadened. It bears noting that some of the countries represented in Tables 3 and 4 are substantially less well-off than is
the U.S. (e.g., Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Poland,
Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain).
What, then, are the main conclusions of our report? Although
we obviously cannot do justice to the wealth of results
reported here, we review below some of the most important
ones.

Poverty and Inequality in 10 Well-Off Countries, 2010
DomainMeasurePrime-Age Employment (percent employed)

Labor Markets

Poverty

Safety Net

Income Inequality

Wealth Inequality
Economic Mobility

Mean
78.1

Lowest68.9(ES)HighestU.S. (rank)

84.8

74.6

(DE)

(8)

Men

84.2

75.7

(ES)

90.6

(DE)

80.1

(9)

Women

72.2

60.6

(IT)

80.0

(DE)

69.2

(8)

Market Income Poverty w/ Relative Threshold(percent < threshold)

34.9

29.1

(AU)

41.2

(FR)

31.2

(2)

Disposable Income Poverty w/ Relative Threshold(percent < threshold)

11.4

7.0

(NO)

16.2

(US)

16.2

(10)

Market Income Poverty w/ Absolute Threshold(percent < threshold)

33.5

25.8

(AU)

42.2

(ES)

26.1

(2)

Disposable Income Poverty w/ Absolute Threshold(percent < threshold)

9.2

3.4

(NO)

20.3

(ES)

9.2

(8)

Relative Poverty Reduction (percentage points)

23.5

15.1

(US)

32.5

(FR)

15.1

(10)

Absolute Poverty Reduction (percentage points)

24.4

16.9

(US)

32.6

(FR)

16.9

(10)

Market Income Inequality (Gini)

0.49

0.41

(NO)

0.52

(FR)

0.51

(9)

Disposable Income Inequality (Gini)

0.32

0.25

(NO)

0.39

(US)

0.39

(10)

Top Decile’s Share of National Wealth (percent)

51.2

43.5

(ES)

77.2

(US)

77.2

(10)

Top Percentile’s Share of National Wealth (percent)

19.0

12.4

(FI)

41.8

(US)

41.8

(10)

Intergenerational Earnings Elasticity

0.35

0.17

(NO)

0.50

(IT, UK)

0.47

(8)

Note: See the relevant report chapters for a description of sources and operationalizations. The 10 countries are: AU (Australia), CA (Canada), DE (Germany), ES (Spain), FI (Finland), FR (France),
IT (Italy), NO (Norway), UK (United Kingdom), and US (United States). In this and all subsequent tables, the labor market and safety net indicators are ranked from high (1) to low (10), while all otherindicators are ranked from low (1) to high (10).

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

executive summary 5
Conclusion #1: There is substantial cross-nationalvariation in poverty and inequality.
It may be unsurprising that countries differ substantially intheir poverty, inequality, and labor market outcomes. But
the extent of this variability is perhaps surprising. The simple conclusion: When the stork drops a newborn child into
his or her new home, the location of that drop has profound
implications for the amount of inequality the child will see
and experience. The top percentile’s share of national wealthranges, for example, from a low of 12.4 percent in Finland toa high of 41.8 percent in the U.S. (see Table 1). The rate ofdisposable income poverty, when measured in relative terms,
ranges from a low of 7.0 percent in Norway to a high of 16.2
percent in the U.S. The prime-age employment rate ranges
from a low of 68.9 percent in Spain to a high of 84.8 percent
in Germany. These results make it clear that, even among therelatively rich countries of Table 1, there are fundamental differences in the type of poverty and inequality regimes thathave been established.
This is not to gainsay the equally important point, as stressedin last year’s State of the Union report, that there is also muchvariability in poverty and inequality regimes within the U.S.
If one compares, for example, the variability in top income
shares across U.S. states with the variability across the well-

TABLE 2.

off countries of North America and Continental Europe, one
finds rather more variability within the U.S.1
Conclusion #2: The U.S. is an outlier.
The first conclusion coming out of Table 1, then, is that one
finds vastly different poverty and inequality profiles evenamong the well-off countries. We are of course especiallyinterested in the position of the U.S. within this wide distribution of profiles. Is the U.S., as many have surmised, indeed an
outlier among the well-off countries? Is it even an outlier when
one considers countries that are less well-off?
The answers to these questions are likely disappointing for
U.S. partisans. As shown in Table 2, the U.S. has the lowest overall ranking among our 10 well-off countries, a resultthat arises in part because it brings up the rear of the packin three of the six domains covered here (safety net, income
inequality, wealth inequality). Even when the comparison set
is expanded to include the less well-off countries, the U.S.
still ranks a dismal 18th (out of 21 countries), with only Spain,
Estonia, and Greece scoring worse (see Table 4).
It is of course well-known that the liberal welfare regimes
found in Anglophone countries (i.e., Australia, Canada, United
Kingdom, U.S.) are inequality-producing machines. Can we

Rankings for 10 Well-Off Countries

Country

Labor
Markets

Poverty

Safety Net

IncomeInequality

WealthInequality

Economic
Mobility

Overall

Australia (AU)

5

2

9

4

2

4

3

Canada (CA)

3

4

8

3

6

3

4

Finland (FI)

7

3

3

2

1

2

1

France (FR)

2

7

1

6

7 (tie)7

6Germany (DE)

1

8

2

5

9

5

5

Italy (IT)

9

9

5

7

4

9 (tie)8

Norway (NO)

4

1

4

1

7 (tie)1

2

Spain (ES)

10

10

7

8

3

6

9

United Kingdom (UK)

6

6

6

9

5

9 (tie)7

United States (US)

8

5

10

10

10

8

10

Note: The ranks presented here were secured by (a) converting the scores on the indicators in Table 1 to country rankings, (b) averaging acrossthe rankings comprising each domain and converting these averages to domain-specific rankings, and (c) averaging across these domain-specificrankings to produce an overall country ranking.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

6

executive summary(with only Spain faring worse). The “highly regulated” labormarkets of Germany, Denmark, or Norway would appear, bycontrast, to be the real job-delivering machines.

understand the U.S. profile as simply the expected profile of an Anglophone liberal welfare economy? The simple
answer: No. As Tables 1 and 2 make clear, the U.S. occupies an extreme position even relative to the four Anglophonecountries, with the implication that the U.S. is a liberal regime“on steroids.” Although the United Kingdom has a poverty
and inequality profile that, among the Anglophone countries,
comes closest to that of the U.S., even relative to this benchmark the U.S. has a distinctively anemic safety net and a
distinctively unequal distribution of wealth (see Table 2).

The U.S. likewise fails to deliver on its long-standing commitment to running a high-mobility regime. The stylized story
here has long been that, however unequal its income distribution may be, the U.S. at least runs a fair and open competitionin which everyone has a legitimate shot at getting ahead. The
data presented in Ch. 7 indicate that in fact the birth lottery
matters more in the U.S. than in most well-off countries. Theintergenerational earnings elasticity, which speaks to the payoff that accrues to being born into higher-earning families, issubstantially larger in the U.S. than in many countries that are
not routinely featured as the “land of opportunity.”

It is noteworthy that the U.S. performs poorly in domains thathave historically been regarded as its strengths. Within thelabor market domain, it has long been argued that the U.S.
is a great “jobs machine,” indeed the distinctive benefit of its
flexible and “unregulated” labor market was supposed to be
the jobs that such deregulation delivered. Where, then, are all
the jobs? As shown in Table 1, the U.S. ranks eighth in primeage employment among women (with only Italy and Spainfaring worse) and ninth in prime-age employment among men

TABLE 3.

Conclusion #3: There is nonetheless some good news.
This is not to suggest that the U.S. performs equally poorly
in all domains. Although there is clearly much that is disappointing in this report, the poverty data also point to a real

Selected Poverty and Inequality Measures for 21 Countries, 2010

DomainMeasurePrime-Age Employment (percent employed)

Labor Markets

Poverty

Safety Net
IncomeInequality

Mean

LowestHighestU.S. (rank)

77.8

63.6

(IE)

84.8

(DE)

74.6

(17)

Men

83.3

67.9

(IE)

90.6

(DE)

80.1

(17)

Women

72.4

56.1

(GR)

80.0

(DE)

69.2

(17)

Market Income Poverty w/ Relative Threshold(percent < threshold)

33.9

22.9

(IS)

43.6

(IE)

31.2

(5)

Disposable Income Poverty w/ Relative Threshold(percent < threshold)

9.7

4.8

(NL)

16.2

(US)

16.2

(21)

Market Income Poverty w/ Absolute Threshold(percent < threshold)

35.8

19.9

(IS)

59.0

(PL)

26.1

(4)

Disposable Income Poverty w/ Absolute Threshold(percent < threshold)

12.9

1.5

(LU)

44.1

(EE)

9.2

(13)

Relative Poverty Reduction (percentage points)

24.3

15.1

(US)

34.3

(IE)

15.1

(21)

Absolute Poverty Reduction (percentage points)

22.9

7.0

(EE)

34.7

(IE)

16.9

(19)

Market Income Inequality (Gini)

0.48

0.40

(IS)

0.58

(IE)

0.51

(18)

Disposable Income Inequality (Gini)

0.30

0.25

(DK)

0.39

(US)

0.39

(21)

Note: See the relevant report chapters for a description of sources and operationalizations. The countries appearing in this table are: AU (Australia), CA (Canada), CZ (Czech Republic), DK (Denmark),
EE (Estonia), FI (Finland), FR (France), DE (Germany), GR (Greece), IS (Iceland), IE (Ireland), IT (Italy), LU (Luxembourg), NL (Netherlands), NO (Norway), PL (Poland), SK (Slovak Republic), SI(Slovenia), ES (Spain), UK (United Kingdom), and US (United States).

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

executive summary 7
opportunity that could be exploited. In understanding the
U.S. poverty data, the usual starting point is of course thatthe rate of disposable-income poverty, which is the rate thatpeople actually experience after taxes and transfers play out,
does not cast the U.S. in a very favorable light. The absolute
poverty rate for disposable income is higher in the U.S. thanin all but two well-off countries (i.e., Spain, Italy). This result,which is discussed at length in Chapter 2, typically provokes
much hand-wringing among scholars of U.S. poverty. The
good news, however, is that the high U.S. rate is attributable
to a very anemic safety net rather than to problems with themarket itself. When market income is instead used to calculate the absolute poverty rate, the U.S. in fact has the second
lowest rate (among the 10 well-off countries in Table 1), with
only Australia having a yet lower rate. Because the weak U.S.
safety net fails to reduce the market rate by all that much, theU.S. ends up with a disposable-income rate that is very high.

most important U.S. problem. The market is in fact delivering adequately (at least by international standards), and thedistinctively U.S. problem is an underperforming safety net.
Why is this good news? It is good news because in principle
it is much easier to ramp up the safety net than to revamp the
economy and labor market in ways that deliver higher market
incomes. If you have to choose your problem, it is far better inthis sense to have a political problem (i.e., an underperforming safety net) than an economic one (i.e., an underperforming
labor market). Although no one should underestimate themagnitude of the U.S. political problem, it is encouraging thatthe requisite reforms are tractable and incremental and hence
conceivably ones that many Americans would find attractive. We need not, for example, install a safety net of social
democratic proportions. Even if the U.S. safety net were only
ramped up to the standard of other liberal economies (especially the United Kingdom), much headway would be made in
reducing poverty.

This is a silver-lining result. It means that, at least when it
comes to poverty, market performance is arguably not theTABLE 4.

Rankings for 21 Countries
Labor
Markets

Poverty

Safety Net

IncomeInequality

Australia (AU)

10

6

18

11

13

Canada (CA)

6

8

15

9

9 (tie)Czech Republic (CZ)

7

11

16

6

11

Denmark (DK)

13

5

4

5

4

Estonia (EE)

16

20

21

15

20

Finland (FI)

15

7

6

8

8

France (FR)

5

12

2

14

7

Germany (DE)

1

15

3

12

6

Greece (GR)

20

18

14

21

21

Iceland (IS)

3

1

19

1

2 (tie)Ireland (IE)

21

16

1

19

15 (tie)

Italy (IT)

18

17

9

16

17

Luxembourg (LU)

4

2

11

13

5

Netherlands (NL)

2

3

5

4

1

Country

Overall

Norway (NO)

9

4

8

3

2 (tie)Poland (PL)

14

21

12

10

15 (tie)

Slovak Republic (SK)

8

14

17

2

12

Slovenia (SI)

11

13

7

7

9 (tie)Spain (ES)

19

19

13

17

19

United Kingdom (UK)

12

10

10

18

14

United States (US)

17

9

20

20

18

Note: The ranks presented here were secured by (a) converting the scores on the indicators in Table 3 to country
rankings, (b) averaging across the rankings comprising each domain and converting these averages to domain-specificrankings, and (c) averaging across these domain-specific rankings to produce an overall country ranking.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

8

executive summary

Why do all bad things come together?
Despite the foregoing silver lining, one has to be immensely
worried that the U.S. has assembled a largely negative bundleof outcomes, indeed the results of Tables 2 and 4 suggest that“all bad things” come together in the U.S. The U.S. ranks deadlast in income and wealth inequality (among the 10 relatively
rich countries of Table 2); its safety net is likewise dead lastwhen it comes to the core task of poverty relief; the prime-age
employment rate for U.S. men, 80.1 percent, is only barely
higher than Spain’s dead-last rate of 75.7 percent; and ourintergenerational elasticity is the eighth largest (among the 10
relatively rich countries of Table 2) and thus starkly at variancewith our reputation as the land of opportunity. Why, it might
be asked, do “all bad things” come together in this way?
There are two complementary answers to this question. The first is that, by virtue of running the consummate
liberal welfare regime, the U.S. has chosen a set of institutions and commitments that are tailor-made for producing
just this constellation of outcomes (see Figure 1). The U.S.
tends to default, for example, to the presumption thatgrossly unequal market outcomes are the result of competitive processes, thus allowing rent-based outcomes at
the top (e.g., excessive CEO pay) to flourish unchallenged.2
Likewise, because market outcomes are viewed as the legitimate outcome of competitive processes, the U.S. is loath
to engage in too much “market-distorting” and incentive-

destroying redistribution. This commitment accounts, forexample, for our famously anemic safety net and ongoing
political efforts to render it yet more anemic. Finally, because
liberalism supports the relentless commodification of everything (e.g., health care, schooling, neighborhood amenities),
the poor are not only disadvantaged because they have lessmoney but also because money is increasingly needed to buy
goods, services, and even opportunities for their children. In
a deeply commodified regime, parents are left to purchasehigh-quality childcare, high-quality primary and secondary
schooling (if only by moving into expensive neighborhoods),
and high-quality college training, all of which means that
opportunity itself has been commodified. But it is not just
opportunity that has been commodified. This commitment tocommodification also leads to unusually large health disparities (via, for example, the “sale” of health), unusually large
income-based disparities in test scores, and many of theother results featured in this report.
The U.S. has, then, a long list of “bad” outcomes because it
has wholeheartedly embraced neoliberal institutions that are
tailor-made for producing such outcomes and then legitimating them as the invisible hand at work. This institutionalist
account, as convincing as it may be, is nonetheless not afull explanation of our poverty and inequality profile. It is very
likely that quite powerful feedback loops are also in play (seeFigure 2). The following is a simple example of how inequality

FIGURE 1. Stylized Representation of Institutional Account

Liberal Welfare Regime
Regulation and Institutional Reform Delegitimated
Redistribution DelegitimatedCommodification Supported

ExtremeResidential
Segregation

Large Barriers
to Economic
Inclusion

Extreme Health
Disparities

Low Prime-Age
Employment

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

Extreme Income& Wealth Inequalityexecutive summary 9
feedback loop, which of course rests on a host of strong (andunsubstantiated) assumptions, is but one of many possible
interactions between different types of inequality. If at least
some of these feedback loops are in operation, we would
expect the many different types of inequality to come intoalignment at high levels and to continue to increase.

FIGURE 2. Illustrative Feedback Loop

Residential
Segregation

IncomeInequality

Barriers to
Economic
Inclusion

may be self-reproducing: The extreme economic segregationof the U.S. implies that (a) poor children are likely to grow up
in poor neighborhoods with relatively poor public schooling,(b) the resulting reduction in demand for college schoolingprotects well-off children from competition “from below” andaccordingly raises the return to schooling, and (c) the associated increase in income inequality then allows for a further
ramp-up in economic segregation. This stylized example of aThis account, if on the mark, is worrying because it suggests a dynamic system that is partly beyond our control. In
the illustrative feedback loop presented above, it is not as if
ever-increasing economic segregation proceeds from some
popular commitment to the virtues of running a high-segregation society. It is instead simply the unintended result offorces that, once set in motion, take on a life of their own.
The purpose of this report may be understood in this sense
as an attempt to wrest back some amount of control over ourpoverty and inequality profile. If there is indeed popular support for the U.S. profile revealed in this report, then of course
the case for intervening is weak. If, however, there is real andabiding public sentiment for change, then it becomes a matter of interceding at some key juncture in the feedback loop
and hence turning it against itself. The unappreciated virtue of
feedback loops is that, although they typically take us in unintended directions, they also contain within them the engine
for converting a destructive loop into a benign one and thus
reversing course. ■NOTES
1. Atkinson, Anthony B., Thomas Piketty, andEmmanuel Saez. 2011. “Top Incomes in theLong Run of History.” Journal of Economic
Literature 49:1, pp. 3-71.

2. There is of course much debate about
whether CEO pay in the U.S. is indeed acase of rent extraction (see, e.g., Saez,
Emmanuel. 2013. “The Case for Taxing Away
Illicit Inequality.” Pathways Magazine. https://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/
pdf/pathways/spring_2013/Pathways_
Spring_2013_Grusky_Saez.pdf).

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

10

S TAT E O F T H E U N I O N

headlabor markets
The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality

BY MICHAEL HOUT

KEY FINDINGS• The current prime-age
employment rate in the
United States, 84 percent
for men and 70 percent for
women (in November 2015),
is lower than that of peer
countries in Europe (i.e.,France, the United Kingdom,
and Germany). Relative tothe full set of 22 well-off
countries in the LIS, the U.S.
ranks 16th in men’s primeage employment and 18th inwomen’s.
• The prime-age employment
rate in the U.S. was hit
especially hard by the GreatRecession. The U.S. had thesixth largest decline in primeage employment between
2004 and 2010 among the 22
countries, with only Ireland,
Hungary, Greece, Spain, andIceland experiencing bigger
declines.
• The prime-age employment
rate in the U.S. stilllanguishes well below prerecession levels. If the current(slow) rate of improvement
continues, the U.S. will likely
fall into another recession
before the male rate returns
to its pre-recession level.

The Great Recession of 2007 to 2009
began as a financial crisis, but playedout as an enduring employment crisis for
American workers. The “housing bubble”
burst, the financial sector tumbled, banks
stopped lending, construction workers losttheir jobs, sales of building materials andappliances plummeted, tax revenues fell,
and the downward spiral threatened to spinever lower. The federal government saved
the banks, and stimulus spending broke thefall in employment. But employment hasbarely kept pace with population growthsince the recovery began in the summer of2009. The U.S. economy enters 2016 withpayrolls increasing and the official unemployment rate down to 5.0 percent. But 31
percent of the unemployed have been out ofwork for 27 weeks or more, and the employment to population ratio is only 59 percent.
These are big problems, but they might
nonetheless be understood as the genericemployment problems of all well-off matureeconomies. The simple question that we
accordingly take on here: Is the U.S. facing
special employment problems? Is there, inother words, “employment exceptionalism”
in the U.S.? Or are pretty much all well-off
economies facing employment problems ofthis magnitude?
We address this question by focusing exclusively on the employment to population
ratio of 25-to-54-year-old people. This is theprime age range for labor force participation:
Those within it are old enough to have completed schooling but are mostly too young
to retire. The more familiar unemployment

rate gives a reasonably accurate picture of
employment during good times, but during recessions, many people who would
prefer to be working become discouraged
and stop looking for a job. The unemployment rate includes only people who werelooking for work in the month of the employment survey; excluding people who havestopped looking makes the economy lookbetter than it is. As a recovery starts, thosepeople start looking for work again, distorting the unemployment rate in the opposite
way—the economy looks worse until thelabor market stabilizes again. The prime-age
employment ratio overcomes this “discouraged worker” problem by keeping tabs on
everyone whether they are looking for workor not.
Although we are mainly interested in how the
U.S. fares comparatively, we will start off witha brief review of the U.S. case alone, focusing
on recent trends in prime-age employment
in the U.S. We then use the LIS data set (formerly the Luxembourg Income Study)1 tocarry out harmonized cross-national comparisons of prime-age employment.
Historic Collapse, Very Slow Recovery
Figure 1 takes the long view of prime-age
employment in the U.S. It plots the primeage employment ratio for men and women(separately) from January 1985 to November
2015 (the most recent data), with recession
months shaded gray. In January 2007, before
the Great Recession, 88 percent of American men 25–54 years old were employed;at the low point three years later, 80 percent
were (a decline of 8 percentage points). The

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

labor markets
head 11
path upward from that low point has been very unsteady; byNovember 2015, men’s prime-age employment ratio was at
84 percent, roughly halfway back to the pre-recession level.
Women’s employment declined less (and more slowly), but
recovered less (and more slowly too). In January 2007, 73
percent of prime-age women were employed. Women’s
employment did not bottom out until November 2011, twoyears after the recession officially ended. By that point,
women’s prime-age employment had slipped to 69 percent; by November 2015, it was less than halfway back. A
4 percentage-point decrease in women’s employment may
not seem like much, but it is the biggest decline in women’s employment on record (record-keeping began in 1947).
Some 20th-century recessions slowed the rate of increase in
women’s employment, but none reduced it by more than 1
percentage point.2 The market for women’s labor in the 21st
century has been very different, in good times and bad, fromthe corresponding market in the 20th century. The highest
prime-age employment ratio for women ever recorded was
75 percent in April 2000; it slipped to 74 percent by the endof 2000 and has been between 69 and 73 percent ever since.
In an earlier report with Erin Cumberworth,3 we regressed
men’s and women’s prime-age employment ratios on thenumber of months from the end of the recession to the month
the ratio was measured. The regression has no substantive
content and should not be considered a forecast or prediction about the future. But it assists in gauging whether the

FIGURE 1. Prime-age Employment Ratio by Month and Gender, January
1985–November 2015

Prime-age Employment Ratio (%)

90
Men

80

Women

70

60
1985

1990

1995

2000

Year

2005

2010

2015

Note: The prime-age employment ratio is the number of employed persons to the total
population, restricted to persons 25 to 54 years old. Source data were seasonally adjusted by the
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS); the author then used locally estimated regression (lowess) tosmooth the BLS series (bandwith = 0.075).

economy is on a path that might eventually lead back to prerecession employment levels. For men, a simple straight line
moving upward from the end of the recession through the endof 2014 describes the trend well. The slope of the trend line is
0.05 percentage points per month. At that pace, the employment to population ratio increased 1 percentage point every
20 months, implying it will take between 12.5 and 13 years formen’s prime-age employment to recover the 8 percentagepoint loss during and after the Great Recession. Because theU.S. economy has never gone 12.5 years without a recession,
we concluded that another recession was likely to reduce
men’s prime-age employment again before this slow recovery restored the employment to pre-recession levels. Anotheryear’s employment data do not suggest that our projections
were off; men’s prime-age employment ratio increased only
0.32 in 12 months, a slower pace than in the five years before.
The outlook for women is slightly better, mainly because
the dip in women’s prime-age employment due to the GreatRecession was only half that of men. Women’s prime-age
employment ratio continued downward slightly for about ayear after the end of the recession before beginning to everso-slowly recover. If the curve is real and not just statisticalnoise, the shape of the curve implies that women’s employment might be back to pre-recession levels one year fromnow, in February 2017.
Differences among Countries
In the U.S., employment trends during and after the GreatRecession reflected, in part, economic policies formulated tooffset the financial crisis and its effects. The 2009 stimulus
package—officially, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—appropriated roughly $800 billion for federal
programs designed to offset decreased private spending due
to the crisis. The Federal Reserve Bank used “quantitativeeasing” to stimulate borrowing. Other countries had different
responses, depending on the threat or reality of bank failures, the banking laws in their country, labor laws, and how
much public services depended on money borrowed abroad.
These differences in the policy response interacted with (1)the potentially idiosyncratic economic conditions facing eachcountry, and (2) the labor market and safety net institutions atplay in each country.
Figure 2 compares the prime-age employment ratios (PERs)of men and women in 22 European or English-speaking countries before and during the Great Recession. As noted above,the data come from the LIS, which provides harmonizedversions of nationally representative data sets with income,wealth, employment, and demographic data. The figure

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

12

labor markets

shows four PERs for each country: women’s PER circa 2004
(red circle with a white center), women’s PER in 2010 (solid
red circle), men’s PER circa 2004 (blue circle with a white center), and men’s PER in 2010 (solid blue circle). Countries areranked from highest (Germany) to lowest (Ireland) on men’s
PER in 2010.
The first result of interest is that the U.S. ranked 14th in women’s PER and 15th in men’s PER even before the recession(out of 22 countries). It follows that the U.S. had substantial employment problems, at least relative to the standard
for well-off countries, well before the recession hit. Moreover,when compared to its true “peer countries” (i.e., the United
Kingdom, Germany, France), the U.S. ranks dead last for
men’s and women’s PER alike.
If the U.S. started off with already-low PERs, might it perhaps
have experienced a less-substantial recession-induced drop

FIGURE 2.

Prime-age Employment Ratio by Country, Circa 2004 and inin PERs? It might be hypothesized, for example, that U.S.
firms were already running “lean and mean,” meaning that
there was less room for further cutting with the recession’s
onset. This was, however, clearly not the case. As Figure 2
shows, men’s employment fell between 2004 and 2010 in
18 of the 22 countries, but the fall in the U.S.—9 percentage
points for men’s PER and 4 for women’s PER—was muchlarger than the average.
Some nations fared much worse: The Euro-crisis countries of
Ireland, Hungary, Greece, and Spain saw the biggest declines
in this key indicator. These declines reflect, to some extent,
the particular vulnerabilities of these economies to the targeted effects of the recession. Ireland, for example, had oneof Europe’s biggest housing bubbles. After Allied Irish Bank
failed and others retrenched, many families owed more thantheir house was worth. Private spending plummeted, and thegovernment could not borrow to keep up demand because it
took on the failed banks’ debts. As a consequence, the job
market collapsed. Men’s PER fell 15 percentage points; women’s PER fell 5 percentage points.

2010

Although Hungary, by contrast, had neither a housing bubble
nor a bank failure, it depended on exports and loans from
Germany. When both declined, men’s PER dropped 13 percentage points and women’s PER dropped 5 percentage
points. Greece had a high percentage in public employment and a low rate of tax collection. When foreign creditors
insisted on austerity, the government nearly defaulted on its
loans. Men’s PER fell 15 percentage points, and women’s
PER fell 4 percentage points. Finally, Spain was fiscally balanced before the crisis, but its labor market was weak. As
domestic spending and exports fell, men’s PER fell by 13 percentage points. Women’s PER was virtually unchanged at oneof Europe’s lowest rates, effectively halting Spain’s processof catching up with the rest of Europe in women’s labor force
participation.

Germany
Netherlands
Luxembourg
Czech Republic
Australia
Italy
FranceIceland
PolandCanadaUnited Kingdom
Slovak Republic
NorwayFinland
Slovenia
Denmark
United States
Estonia
Spain
GreeceHungary
Ireland

X

55

X

70
85
Prime-age Employment Ratio (%)

100

Women:

2010(wave 8)

2003-2005(wave 6)

Range

Men:

2010
(wave 8)

2003-2005(wave 6)Range

The more telling contrasts are arguably with the “peer economies” of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Relative
to this standard, U.S. employment fared the worst. In the
United Kingdom and France, the men’s PER fell only 3 percentage points, whereas it fell 9 percentage points in the U.S.
At the same time, women’s PER was unchanged in the United
Kingdom and actually rose 2 points in France, whereas it fell 4
percentage points in the U.S. Germany fared best: Men’s PER
rose 3 points; women’s PER rose 5 points. Finally, employment dropped very little in the Scandinavian countries, and it
increased slightly in the Netherlands, Australia, and Italy.

Note: X’s show most recent data for the U.S. Hungary’s wave 8 data were collected in 2009.
Dashed lines indicate increases over time.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

labor markets 13
The upshot of the data in Figure 2 is that the U.S. labor market
fell more than labor markets in other mature economies. To be
sure, employment in the U.S. did not collapse as it did in thespecial cases of Ireland, Hungary, Greece, and Spain, but it
certainly performed worse than its peer countries (the United
Kingdom, France, Germany).
Why was the U.S. so hard hit? There are two reasons: First,
because the Great Recession was driven by a financial crisis
and a housing bubble, it was bound to hit the U.S. harderthan countries that relied less on these two sectors. Second, the U.S. protects workers against income loss throughunemployment insurance, but it has permissive laws on layoffs. Employers are freer to lay off workers than they are
elsewhere. As Figures 1 and 2 show, the U.S. not only took
a bigger employment hit than other nations, it has not fully
recovered by the end of 2015 (the X’s in Figure 2 mark the2015 PER for the U.S.).

FIGURE 3.

The LIS cannot yet be used to carry out a full comparison ofcontemporary PERs. Only a handful of “wave 9” data sets,
which are needed to bring the time series up to the presentday, are available in the LIS. To fill in the recent experiences,
I have supplemented the LIS data with official reports countries make to the Organization for Economic Cooperation andDevelopment (OECD).4 The LIS and OECD define PERs thesame way, but the results do not align perfectly in all countries, so I report some of each in Figure 3. It shows the PERs
by gender based on LIS data up until 2005 and based on
OECD data from 2000 to 2014.
The news from the OECD data is not good. These data makeeven clearer how the U.S. stands out among other matureeconomies. Here again, we see that job loss was worse in
the U.S. than in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany,
as noted above. The U.S. ranked 14th in women’s PER and15th in men’s PER before the recession (out of 22 countries),
but after the dust settled and the recovery occurred, the U.S.

Prime-Age Employment Ratio by Year, Gender, and Country, 1990–2014

Ireland

GreeceHungary

Spain

IcelandUnited States

Estonia

Slovenia

Denmark

CanadaLuxembourg

United Kingdom

Slovak Republic

FranceNorwayNetherlands

Italy

Finland

Australia

Czech Republic

Germany

Poland90
75

Prime-age employment ratio (%)

60
45
30
90
75
60
45
30
90
Men

75

LIS
OECD

60

Women
LIS

45

OECD

30
1990 2000 2010 1990 2000 2010 1990 2000 2010 1990 2000 2010 1990 2000 2010 1990 2000 2010Year

Note: Circles show LIS data; series that are just lines are annual OECD data.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 201614

labor markets

ranked 18th in women’s PER and 16th in men’s PER. The only
countries with a lower PER are Greece, Italy, Spain, and Ireland (for both women’s and men’s PER), plus Finland and the
Slovak Republic (for men’s PER).
We led off by asking whether the U.S. is facing special
employment problems or just the standard-issue employment
problems of mature economies. The answer to this questionis, unfortunately, resoundingly clear: There is indeed “employment exceptionalism” in the U.S.
Conclusions
In 2009 and 2010, the U.S. economy suffered the most job
loss in the postwar era. Job seekers of all ages had trouble
finding work, millions got discouraged and quit looking forwork, and unemployment spells lasted longer than at any
time on record. The prime-age employment ratio, the best
measure of the health of the labor force, dropped to the lowest level on record among men and had the largest drop everamong women. Six years later, employment has improved,
but neither men nor women have regained their pre-recession
employment levels.

This dismal jobs picture is not entirely unique. Vulnerable
countries like Greece, Ireland, Hungary, and Spain also experienced huge job losses in the recession. But no other large
economy suffered the same level of employment drop-off.
The United Kingdom, France, and Canada saw much lesschange in employment, and Germany actually experienced
an increase in employment.
Will there be a reversal in the employment fortunes of the
U.S.? The key—and open—questions in this regard arewhether a new job-creating invention in the U.S. will reverse
recent trends, whether automation will have the job-reducing
effects that even some mainstream economists now openly
discuss, and whether the growing interest in public-sector
jobs of “last resort” proves to have any long-run traction. ■Michael Hout is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center
for Advanced Social Science Research at New York University.
He leads the Recession and Recovery Research Group at the
Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.

NOTES
1. Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database,
http://www.lisdatacenter.org (multiple countries; 1990-2010). Luxembourg: LIS.
2. Hout, Michael, and Erin Cumberworth. 2014.
“Labor Markets.” The Poverty and Inequality
Report: A Special Issue of Pathways Magazine.
Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.

3. Hout, Michael, and Erin Cumberworth. 2015.
“Labor Markets.” The Poverty and Inequality
Report: A Special Issue of Pathways Magazine.
Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.
4. Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) Database, https://data.oecd.org/emp/employment-rate-by-agegroup.htm (multiple countries; 2000-2014).
Employment rate by age group (indicator). doi:
10.1787/084f32c7-en.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

S TAT E O F T H E U N I O N

head 15

poverty
The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality

BY JANET C. GORNICK AND MARKUS JÄNTTI

KEY FINDINGS• Using a relative poverty
standard for disposable
household income, the U.S.
poverty rate exceeds thatreported in all of the otherhigh-income countries inthis study, with the sole
exception of Israel.
• The well-known exceptionalism of American relative
poverty extends only torich countries. Most of the
middle-income countries inthis study report higher relative poverty rates than areseen in the United States.
• U.S. children are 30 percent
more likely to live in relative
poverty than is the U.S.
population overall. This
general pattern is not
unusual. In about threequarters of the rich countries
included in this study,
children’s poverty risk (visà-vis disposable income)is higher than that of all
persons.
• When we consider absolute
poverty (using a poverty line
based on the official U.S.
threshold), American children
are more likely to be poor
than children in 11 of the 20
study countries. And nine ofthese 11 countries—all but
Luxembourg and Norway—
are less affluent than the U.S.

I

t is well-known, at least among scholars of poverty, that the U.S. has morepoverty than most other high-income
countries. That result has now been
established in a substantial research literature based on data from LIS (formerly
known as the Luxembourg Income
Study), from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development(OECD), and from Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Union).1 In
this report, we take a closer look at thatclaim, drilling down and extending it inseveral ways. We first examine just how
robust the claim is. We explore whether
the U.S. still stands out as a high-poverty country (a) when a broader rangeof countries, even middle-income ones,
are considered; (b) when poverty isdefined in terms of both market income
and disposable income;2 and (c) whenpoverty is defined in both relative andabsolute terms.
Second, we examine whether the U.S.
has a distinctive system when it comesto poverty among children, a subgroupthat draws our attention due to the worrisome consequences, both short- andlong-term, associated with child poverty. We know that U.S. children are 30
percent more likely to live in poverty
than is the U.S. population overall. Here,
we ask: Is that a widespread pattern?
In other words, is poverty among children disproportionately high within othercountries too?

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

We next assess the association between
poverty risk and household structure.
The key question here is whether single
mothers in all countries, not just the U.S.,
are exposed to a disproportionate riskof poverty. We thus start with the finding that, in the U.S., households headedby single mothers are nearly four times
as likely to be poor as are those headedby two parents. We again ask: Is that awidespread pattern?
The risk of poverty in the U.S. is alsostrongly affected by educational attainment3 and attachment to the labormarket.4 In the U.S., persons withouthigh-school degrees are more than six
times as likely to be poor as those whohave completed post-secondary school,and persons with no earnings are 80
times as likely to live in poor households
as are those whose earnings place themin the top two-thirds of their earnings
distribution.5 Again, we ask: Are thesedisparities—including the steepness ofthe gradients—widespread?
Brief Remarks about Our
Empirical WorkAll of our results are based on microdata contained in the LIS database.6
The first table, which includes 34 countries, pertains to households with headsof all ages. In subsequent tables (Tables
2–5), we restrict our analyses to younger
households and persons. Tables 2 and3 include households with heads below
age 60, and Tables 4 and 5 include persons aged 25–59.

16

poverty

TABLE 1. Overall Poverty Rates in High- and Middle-Income Countries, 2010

A

B

C

D

E

50% DHI
Income Level,
2010

MarketIncome (MI)Disposable
HouseholdIncome (DHI)F

U.S. Line
Poverty
Reduction(MI Less DHI)

MarketIncome (MI)Disposable
HouseholdIncome (DHI)

Poverty
Reduction(MI Less DHI)ANGLOPHONE
Australia

H

29.1

13.8

15.3

25.8

5.7

20.1

Canada

H

33.0

12.0

21.1

28.2

6.4

21.8

Ireland

H

43.6

9.3

34.3

43.1

8.4

34.7

United Kingdom

H

33.6

10.1

23.5

33.0

9.2

23.8

United States

H

Group average

31.2

16.2

15.1

26.1

9.2

16.9

34.1

12.3

21.8

31.2

7.8

23.5

CONTINENTAL EUROPE
France

H

41.2

8.6

32.5

39.6

7.0

32.6

Germany

H

40.9

11.3

29.6

39.5

8.2

31.3

Luxembourg

H

31.4

5.7

25.7

22.7

1.5

21.2

Netherlands

H

31.3

4.8

26.6

30.0

3.1

26.9

36.2

7.6

28.6

32.9

5.0

28.0

Group average
EASTERN EUROPE
Czech Republic

H

28.6

6.3

22.2

37.4

17.2

20.3

Estonia

H

34.5

11.7

22.9

51.2

44.1

7.0

Georgia

M

38.2

18.6

19.6

96.4

95.6

0.8

Hungary

H

69.9

7.0

62.9

85.6

44.8

40.8

Poland

H

36.9

9.2

27.7

59.0

40.0

19.0

Russia

M

32.0

13.1

18.9

49.6

33.1

16.5
15.1

Serbia

M

44.8

14.1

30.7

81.7

66.5

Slovak Republic

H

29.2

7.3

21.8

40.7

22.0

18.7

Slovenia

H

35.5

10.2

25.2

39.2

14.0

25.1

38.8

10.8

28.0

60.1

41.9

18.1

Group average
NORDIC EUROPE
Denmark

H

32.3

6.1

26.2

30.7

3.2

27.5

Finland

H

32.4

7.2

25.2

30.7

4.0

26.7

Iceland

H

22.9

5.7

17.2

19.9

3.3

16.6

Norway

H

31.4

7.0

24.4

27.8

3.4

24.4

29.8

6.5

23.3

27.3

3.5

23.8

Group average
SOUTHERN EUROPE
Greece

H

37.5

13.0

24.4

43.1

22.2

20.9

Italy

H

37.4

12.7

24.7

42.1

18.1

24.0

Spain

H

Group average

38.7

14.7

24.0

42.2

20.3

22.0

37.9

13.5

24.4

42.5

20.2

22.3

LATIN AMERICA
Brazil

M

33.9

17.2

16.7

80.0

75.2

4.8

Colombia

M

21.5

19.7

1.8

87.4

87.5

-0.1

Mexico

M

27.1

19.8

7.3

82.2

79.0

3.2

Panama

M

28.6

22.1

6.5

73.1

70.6

2.5

Peru

M

29.4

25.2

4.2

82.2

81.4

0.8

Uruguay

M

33.5

15.2

18.3

74.3

65.9

8.4

29.0

19.9

9.1

79.9

76.6

3.3

Group average
OTHER
Israel

H

32.7

20.2

12.5

39.9

30.5

9.4

South Africa

M

47.1

25.8

21.3

82.9

83.9

-1.0

Taiwan

H

12.3

11.7

0.6

11.7

10.9

0.8

Source: Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database, authors’ calculations. A table of poverty rates for all countries and years in the full LIS Database is available in an online appendix to this report.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

poverty
head 17

Absolute Poverty Rate (Percent Below U.S. Poverty Line)FIGURE 1. Overall Poverty Rates in High- and Middle-Income Countries, 2010

100

Poverty Rates Based on
Disposable Household Income (DHI)

90

GE
CO
ZA

80

MX

70

RS

PE

BR
PA

UY

60
50

HU

40

EE

PL

RU

30
SK

20

CZ

SI

GR
IT

TW
IS DK NOFI FR IE UK DE CA
NL
LU

10
0
0

5

IL
ES

AU

U.S.

10
15
20
25
Relative Poverty Rate (Percent Below 50% of Median DHI)

30

35

Source: Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database, authors’ calculations.

One of our core interests is the poverty-reducing effects oftaxes and transfers. We omit older households (i.e., withheads aged 60+) and persons (i.e., age 60+) in order to lay
aside income support programs that primarily serve retirees;
those programs have distinct logics, and a full assessment ofthem is outside the scope of this report.
Furthermore, in Tables 2–5, we examine a subset of the countries covered in Table 1. In these latter tables, we focus on 20
countries, selected because they are all high-income countries (and thus the most straightforward comparators for theU.S.) and because they all contain data on pre-tax market
income. Having pre-tax data allows us to calculate comparable estimates of poverty reduction, capturing both taxes andtransfers, across all 20 of these countries.
Throughout this report, we group countries by “regime type,”
drawing on a widely used social science framework that classifies countries according to social policy designs; theseregimes, of course, overlap standard geographic groupings
as well. We make use of these clusters—however imperfectthey are—because they provide an organizing framework forassessing cross-national variation. They help us to identify
empirical patterns across countries, and they bring into relief

the importance of policy configurations for poverty reduction.
The U.S. in Comparative Perspective
We begin with an overview of poverty across nearly threedozen countries, deploying standard definitions of the poverty line7 and of country income levels (see Table 1).8 The corequestion here, it may be recalled, is whether the conventionalview—that the U.S. system produces high poverty rates—isrobust across a more expansive range of countries and withregard to multiple poverty definitions.
Table 1 shows that, among high-income countries (marked
H), U.S. poverty rates are indeed exceptionally high. When
we consider disposable-income poverty in relative terms (seecolumn B), which is the most common approach in comparative poverty studies, the U.S. poverty rate (16.2%) exceedsthat reported in every other high-income country included
here, with the sole exception of Israel (20.2%). The crossnational variation is substantial. In 12 of these high-income
countries, poverty rates based on this measure are below 10
percent; in the Netherlands, the rate is below 5 percent.
Is the U.S. just as exceptional among a broader range ofcountries? The simple answer: No. Among middle-income

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18

poverty

countries (marked M), the result is, in fact, quite different.
Nearly all of the middle-income countries in this study reporthigher relative poverty rates than are seen in the U.S. Countries with greater relative poverty include five Latin Americancountries (Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Peru), as wellas Georgia and South Africa. Thus, the well-known exceptionalism of American9 poverty pertains to rich countries; it is
not a universal result. Again, the variation is not insubstantial;
relative poverty in South Africa exceeds 25 percent.
When we consider columns A, B, and C together, we understand more fully what drives the high rate of U.S. poverty
vis-à-vis disposable income. First, U.S. disposable income
poverty (16.2%) is the ninth highest among these 34 countries. Second, in contrast, U.S. market income poverty(31.2%) is 25th highest. Third, the level of poverty reduction(15.1 percentage points) is the seventh lowest. We can thus
conclude: The high disposable income poverty rate in the
U.S. is driven more by meager poverty reduction than by highmarket poverty rates. The only countries that reduce poverty,
via taxes and transfers, less than the U.S. does are four Latin
American countries, Israel, and Taiwan (and, in Taiwan, little
poverty reduction is needed).
What about poverty with respect to a fixed real income poverty line, often called absolute poverty? When we switch ourframework to use the official U.S. poverty line as our anchor,
our results shift again—and markedly. Using that U.S. line,
disposable income poverty in the U.S. is 9.2 percent (seecolumn E). The absolute poverty rate is higher in all 10 middle-income countries (not surprisingly). It is also higher in 11
other high-income countries—including all of the Eastern andSouthern European countries in our analysis. At the sametime, U.S. absolute poverty remains high among a core groupof rich comparator countries (see Figure 1).10 American poverty, using the U.S. line, exceeds that reported in all of theother Anglophone countries (except the UK), as well as in allof the Continental and Nordic cases. In cross-national terms,
American poverty stands out—and that is true for both relative poverty and absolute poverty.
Children as a Special Case
It is well known that the rate of poverty among children is highin the U.S. We replicate this well-known result here: Amongthe 20 rich countries included in Table 2, the U.S. reports thehighest rate of disposable income poverty among children:
21.1 percent (see column B). In general, (relative) child poverty
is most prevalent in the U.S. and in the Southern European
countries; it is least prevalent in the Nordic countries.
As was found in Table 1, when we shift to absolute poverty,

the U.S. falls to a middling position. In absolute terms, children are more likely to be poor in the Eastern and Southern
European countries, but they are also less likely to be poor,
compared to American children, in 11 of these 20 study countries. Nine of those 11 countries—all but Luxembourg and
Norway—are less affluent than the U.S.
It is also often noted that U.S. children are at greater risk ofpoverty than is the American population as a whole. Indeed,vis-à-vis relative poverty, our results indicate that American
children are, remarkably, 30 percent more likely to live in poverty than is the U.S. population overall (see Table 2, column
H). Is this a widespread pattern? In fact, it is. In about threequarters of the 20 rich countries included here, children’s
poverty risk (vis-à-vis disposable income) is higher than thatof all persons.
This same result does not, however, hold for market income.
In all five country groups, children’s risk of living in poverty—
when we consider market income (see column G)—is lessthan the risk reported in their countries more generally. Relative to overall poverty in their own countries, children are 93
percent as likely to be market-income poor (on average) in
the Anglophone group, 65–68 percent in the Continental andEastern European countries, and 56 percent in both the Nordic and Southern European clusters. That general pattern is
not surprising; children live in households with adults whose
main income source is the labor market (see Table 2), whereas
country populations as a whole (see Table 1) include households with elderly adults who have left paid work for partial or
full retirement (and who thus have little or no market income).
When we shift to disposable income poverty (see column H),
the story changes dramatically. As noted, in most of thesestudy countries, children’s poverty risk is higher than in theircountries overall. It is lower in only four countries: three Nordic
countries (Denmark, Finland, and Norway) and (by a smaller
margin) in the UK.
The final point to be made, as shown in column I, is thatpoverty reduction is much more limited for children than for
persons overall (with the UK as an exception). While children
are not expected to be as dependent on income augmentation by the state as are other demographic groups (suchas older persons), state interventions still matter. Consider
a comparison of the U.S. and the UK. The two have similar
rates of market income poverty: 30.3 percent in the U.S. and33.8 percent in the UK (see column A). But they are extremely
different with respect to disposable income poverty: 21.1
percent in the U.S. compared to 9.4 percent in the UK (seecolumn B). This country pairing tells us that, regarding child

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

poverty 19
TABLE 2. Child Poverty Rates in High-Income Countries, 2010

A

B

C

D

50% DHI

E

F

G

H

I

Ratio of all children to all persons(Table 2 compared to Table 1)

U.S. Line

50% DHIMarketIncome (MI)Disposable
HouseholdIncome(DHI)

Poverty
Reduction(MI Less
DHI)

MarketIncome (MI)Disposable
HouseholdIncome(DHI)

Poverty
Reduction(MI Less
DHI)

MarketIncome (MI)Disposable
HouseholdIncome(DHI)

Poverty
Reduction(MI Less
DHI)
0.88

ANGLOPHONE
Australia

27.8

14.4

13.4

22.8

7.0

15.8

0.96

1.04

Canada

25.6

14.3

11.2

19.1

6.9

12.2

0.77

1.20

0.53

Ireland

42.1

10.1

32.0

41.6

9.2

32.4

0.97

1.09

0.93
1.04

United Kingdom

33.8

9.4

24.4

32.8

8.1

24.8

1.01

0.93

United States

30.3

21.1

9.2

23.2

12.1

11.1

0.97

1.30

0.61

Group average

31.9

13.9

18.1

27.9

8.7

19.3

0.93

1.11

0.80
0.54

CONTINENTAL EUROPE
France

29.1

11.5

17.7

26.8

8.8

18.0

0.71

1.33

Germany

29.2

19.1

10.1

27.2

16.4

10.8

0.71

1.69

0.34

Luxembourg

25.3

9.4

15.9

12.1

1.7

10.4

0.80

1.65

0.62

Netherlands

11.4

6.3

5.1

9.7

3.2

6.5

0.36

1.33

0.19

Group average

23.8

11.6

12.2

19.0

7.5

11.4

0.65

1.50

0.42

EASTERN EUROPE
Czech Republic

18.3

10.6

7.7

31.5

22.9

8.6

0.64

1.67

0.35

Estonia

22.4

12.7

9.7

43.3

36.9

6.4

0.65

1.09

0.42

Poland

25.4

12.0

13.4

54.3

46.8

7.5

0.69

1.30

0.48

Slovak Republic

21.2

13.2

8.0

38.9

31.1

7.7

0.73

1.81

0.37

Group average

21.8

12.1

9.7

42.0

34.4

7.6

0.68

1.47

0.41
0.39

NORDIC EUROPE
Denmark

14.6

4.5

10.1

12.9

2.3

10.6

0.45

0.74

Finland

16.0

3.7

12.3

14.0

1.9

12.0

0.49

0.51

0.49

Iceland

17.2

7.4

9.8

13.3

3.5

9.8

0.75

1.30

0.57

Norway

16.5

5.2

11.3

12.1

1.8

10.4

0.53

0.74

0.46

Group average

16.1

5.2

10.9

13.1

2.4

10.7

0.56

0.82

0.48

Greece

17.9

17.3

0.6

25.6

27.4

-1.8

0.48

1.33

0.02

Italy

21.2

19.1

2.1

27.5

25.2

2.3

0.57

1.50

0.08

Spain

24.9

20.6

4.3

30.0

27.0

3.0

0.64

1.40

0.18

Group average

21.3

19.0

2.3

27.7

26.5

1.1

0.56

1.41

0.10

SOUTHERN EUROPE

Source: Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database, authors’ calculations. Child = under age 18 living with household head under age 60.

poverty, policy matters, and it matters a lot.
Household Type Matters
Another stylized fact, widely reported in the U.S., is that persons in households headed by single mothers are especiallylikely to be poor. In Table 3, we see that Americans living insingle mother–headed households are indeed at high risk of(disposable income) poverty—fully 36.5 percent are poor (seecolumn B). That is the highest rate among these 20 countries.
What is driving this high poverty rate in the U.S.? Consider
the market-income poverty results (see column A). Note that

there are three countries, among these 20, where marketincome poverty among single mother–headed households issimilar or higher than it is in the U.S. (where it is 50.1%): Ireland (70.9%), the UK (56.0%), and Luxembourg (50.6%). Yetin these three comparison cases, disposable-income poverty
is substantially lower than it is in the U.S. (where it is 36.5%):
Ireland (22.7%), the UK (12.3%), and Luxembourg (25.9%).
These results indicate that that the impact of tax-and-transfer
policy varies across national contexts, and it varies extensively.
Our results reveal that Americans in two-parent households

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 201620

poverty

TABLE 3. Poverty Rates by Household Structure, 2010

A

B

C

D

Single-Mother Households

E

F

G

H

I

Single-Mother Households /Two-Parent Households

Two-Parent Households

MarketIncome (MI)Disposable
HouseholdIncome (DHI)

Poverty
Reduction(MI Less DHI)

MarketIncome (MI)Disposable
HouseholdIncome (DHI)

Poverty
Reduction(MI Less DHI)

MarketIncome (MI)Disposable
HouseholdIncome (DHI)

Poverty
Reduction(MI Less DHI)

Australia

46.5

22.5

24.0

13.1

6.9

6.2

3.5

3.3

3.9

Canada

40.8

26.0

14.8

14.9

7.6

7.3

2.7

3.4

2.0

Ireland

70.9

22.7

48.2

27.3

5.5

21.8

2.6

4.1

2.2

United Kingdom 56.0

12.3

43.7

17.0

6.7

10.2

3.3

1.8

4.3

United States

50.1

36.5

13.7

15.5

9.7

5.8

3.2

3.8

2.4

Group average

52.9

24.0

28.9

17.5

7.3

10.3

3.1

3.3

2.9
2.2

ANGLOPHONECONTINENTAL EUROPE
France

45.4

20.9

24.5

18.2

7.0

11.2

2.5

3.0

Germany

47.8

28.0

19.8

10.9

5.3

5.6

4.4

5.3

3.5

Luxembourg

50.6

25.9

24.8

16.0

5.2

10.8

3.2

5.0

2.3

Netherlands

38.2

14.5

23.8

4.9

2.2

2.7

7.8

6.6

8.8

Group average

45.5

22.3

23.2

12.5

4.9

7.6

4.5

5.0

4.2

EASTERN EUROPE
Czech Republic

33.5

22.1

11.4

9.7

5.3

4.4

3.4

4.1

2.6

Estonia

28.7

23.6

5.1

13.9

8.6

5.3

2.1

2.8

1.0

Poland

36.9

15.6

21.3

18.7

9.6

9.1

2.0

1.6

2.3

Slovak Republic

22.0

13.5

8.5

10.5

7.3

3.2

2.1

1.8

2.7

Group average

30.3

18.7

11.6

13.2

7.7

5.5

2.4

2.6

2.1

NORDIC EUROPE
Denmark

31.7

6.8

24.9

6.7

2.1

4.5

4.8

3.2

5.5

Finland

35.3

10.3

25.0

11.4

2.5

8.9

3.1

4.2

2.8

Iceland

37.5

16.0

21.5

6.8

2.8

4.1

5.5

5.8

5.3

Norway

37.5

9.4

28.1

7.0

1.5

5.4

5.4

6.2

5.2

Group average

35.5

10.6

24.9

8.0

2.2

5.7

4.7

4.8

4.7

SOUTHERN EUROPE
Greece

32.2

22.6

9.6

16.0

14.1

1.9

2.0

1.6

5.1

Italy

36.1

25.1

11.0

18.0

15.3

2.7

2.0

1.6

4.1

Spain

38.0

28.4

9.6

20.4

15.5

5.0

1.9

1.8

1.9

Group average

35.4

25.3

10.1

18.1

15.0

3.2

2.0

1.7

3.7

Source: Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database, authors’ calculations. Universe restricted to households with heads below age 60.

are also at comparatively high risk of poverty (see columnE)—although the U.S. outcome (9.7%) is not as exceptional
as it is for single mother–headed households. Persons in twoparent households in all three Southern European countries
are more likely to be poor than are their U.S. counterparts.
Overall, while the magnitudes vary across countries, we do
see a somewhat universal pattern. In all 20 countries, persons
in households headed by a single mother are more likely to
be poor—both before and after taxes and transfers—than are
persons in households headed by two parents. It is also thecase that poverty reduction is always greater in single-parent
households—but not extensive enough to equalize poverty

rates “at the end of the day” (that is, disposable income poverty) between the two household types.
Education Matters
One’s economic prospects, including the risk of being poor,
are, of course, shaped by another crucial demographic factor: one’s own educational attainment. In Table 4, we reportpoverty rates for persons (aged 25–59) with low, medium, andhigh levels of educational attainment.
Education systems are complex, so measuring educational
attainment with perfect institutional comparability acrosscountries is not possible. Nevertheless, nearly everywhere,

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

poverty 21

TABLE 4. Poverty Rates by Educational Attainment among Persons Aged 25–59, 2010

A

B

C

D

Low Education

E

F

G

Medium Education

H

I

High Education

MarketIncome (MI)Disposable
Poverty
Household
Reduction
Income (DHI) (MI Less DHI)

MarketIncome (MI)Disposable
Poverty
Household
Reduction
Income (DHI) (MI Less DHI)

MarketIncome (MI)Disposable
Poverty
Household
Reduction
Income (DHI) (MI Less DHI)

Australia

30.1

15.0

15.1

17.3

9.4

7.9

10.0

5.9

4.1

Canada

38.2

20.6

17.6

25.1

13.8

11.3

16.1

9.3

6.8

Ireland

55.5

13.1

42.4

35.1

7.7

27.4

16.3

5.1

11.2

United Kingdom

49.2

15.5

33.7

20.9

7.6

13.3

9.5

5.8

3.7

United States

51.3

37.8

13.5

25.4

15.9

9.5

9.7

5.9

3.8

Group average

44.9

20.4

24.5

24.8

10.9

13.9

12.3

6.4

5.9

ANGLOPHONECONTINENTAL EUROPE
France

40.9

13.6

27.2

21.5

7.5

14.1

10.3

4.6

5.8

Germany

35.8

19.7

16.2

19.0

11.5

7.5

10.6

6.7

3.9

Luxembourg

31.6

11.2

20.4

15.8

4.7

11.1

6.2

2.8

3.4

Netherlands

22.0

5.2

16.8

11.9

4.2

7.7

7.7

3.6

4.1

Group average

32.6

12.4

20.1

17.1

7.0

10.1

8.7

4.4

4.3

EASTERN EUROPE
Czech Republic

44.5

19.1

25.4

14.0

5.8

8.2

4.7

1.8

2.9

Estonia

40.7

24.9

15.8

23.9

15.0

8.9

7.0

4.3

2.8

Poland

54.5

24.3

30.1

26.9

9.5

17.5

7.7

2.0

5.8

Slovak Republic

52.2

26.7

25.5

16.7

7.9

8.8

6.0

3.3

2.7

Group average

48.0

23.7

24.2

20.4

9.5

10.8

6.3

2.8

3.5

Denmark

32.0

6.2

25.8

12.3

3.9

8.4

8.1

3.6

4.6

Finland

33.5

11.1

22.4

20.8

7.7

13.1

7.1

2.8

4.3

Iceland

21.0

5.3

15.7

14.8

7.6

7.2

7.4

4.4

3.0

Norway

31.7

6.7

25.0

13.4

3.3

10.1

8.4

4.2

4.2

Group average

29.6

7.3

22.2

15.3

5.6

9.7

7.8

3.8

4.0

NORDIC EUROPE

SOUTHERN EUROPE
Greece

33.7

21.8

11.9

21.3

13.3

8.0

12.3

4.8

7.5

Italy

33.8

20.9

12.9

15.3

7.9

7.4

7.9

3.5

4.4

Spain

36.6

21.0

15.6

19.7

11.7

8.0

10.8

6.3

4.6

Group average

34.7

21.2

13.5

18.8

10.9

7.8

10.4

4.9

5.5

Source: Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database, authors’ calculations.

poverty rates—based on both market and disposable
income—are highest in the least educated group, lower in themedium-educated group, and lower yet in the most highly
educated group.11 Not surprisingly, then, the reverse holds forpoverty reduction; in all 20 study countries, it falls as educational attainment rises.
The U.S. result, while not entirely exceptional, is notable.
Among those with the lowest attainment (see column B),
Americans are the most likely to be poor (37.8%); this reflects
the general pattern of high poverty in the U.S., as shown
throughout this report. Among those with the highest attainment (see column H), Americans are the fourth most likely to
be poor (5.9%; tied with Australia); highly educated persons

are more likely to be poor in Spain (6.3%), Germany (6.7%),
and Canada (9.3%).
In the U.S., those with the least education (as a group) are
more than six times as likely to be poor as those with the mosteducation (results not shown). That ratio—6.4—is exceededin only three countries (all in Eastern Europe). In the U.S., aseverywhere, education matters, and again, it matters a lot.
Paid Work Matters
In the U.S., we take it for granted that working for pay—and
especially commanding high earnings—is a poverty prevention tool. Is that reliably the case in the U.S.? And elsewhere?
And for whom? In Table 5, we report disposable income pov-

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 201622

poverty

TABLE 5. Poverty Rates by Gender and Level of Earnings among Persons Aged 25–59, 2010

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

Gender Gap
All persons 25–59
Men 25–59
Women 25–59(Women minus Men)
MediumMediumMediumMediumNo
Low
High
No
Low
High
No
Low
High
No
Low
High
Earnings Earnings Earnings Earnings Earnings Earnings Earnings Earnings Earnings Earnings Earnings Earnings
ANGLOPHONE
Australia

31.0

8.6

0.3

40.0

8.5

0.1

26.4

8.6

0.5

-13.6

0.0

Canada

37.2

20.6

0.3

42.0

20.6

0.2

34.1

20.6

0.5

-7.9

0.0

0.4
0.3

Ireland

18.6

7.7

0.0

20.9

9.1

0.0

17.0

6.1

0.1

-3.9

-3.0

0.1

United Kingdom

24.1

9.1

0.5

32.2

9.5

0.3

19.0

8.7

0.7

-13.2

-0.8

0.4

United States

37.9

21.3

0.5

42.0

20.6

0.2

35.6

22.1

0.8

-6.5

1.5

0.6

Group average

29.7

13.4

0.3

35.4

13.7

0.2

26.4

13.2

0.5

-9.0

-0.4

0.3

CONTINENTAL EUROPE
France

28.4

12.0

0.4

32.6

12.4

0.2

26.0

11.6

0.5

-6.6

-0.8

0.3

Germany

33.0

15.4

3.7

50.6

12.7

2.4

25.7

17.8

4.9

-24.9

5.1

2.6

Luxembourg

13.1

13.1

0.7

14.9

12.6

0.2

12.3

13.8

1.3

-2.6

1.2

1.0

Netherlands

12.4

7.7

0.5

20.1

8.0

0.0

9.0

7.3

0.9

-11.1

-0.7

0.9

Group average

21.7

12.1

1.3

29.6

11.4

0.7

18.3

12.6

1.9

-11.3

1.2

1.2

EASTERN EUROPE
Czech Republic

18.4

9.3

0.2

23.3

8.9

0.1

16.7

9.7

0.2

-6.6

0.8

0.0

Estonia

36.0

22.2

0.5

45.4

22.9

0.0

28.7

21.5

1.1

-16.7

-1.4

1.1

Poland

19.6

9.6

0.7

24.3

11.2

0.6

16.9

7.7

0.7

-7.4

-3.6

0.1

Slovak Republic

24.6

11.1

0.8

27.8

11.0

0.8

22.4

11.1

0.8

-5.4

0.1

0.0

Group average

24.6

13.0

0.5

30.2

13.5

0.4

21.2

12.5

0.7

-9.0

-1.0

0.3

Denmark

16.2

7.1

0.2

21.2

7.1

0.0

11.9

7.1

0.3

-9.2

0.0

0.2

Finland

27.4

9.1

0.0

33.6

10.3

0.0

21.8

7.9

0.0

-11.8

-2.4

0.0

Iceland

17.0

15.0

0.1

22.9

13.6

0.0

13.5

16.5

0.3

-9.4

2.9

0.3

Norway

16.2

8.9

0.2

20.2

9.5

0.1

13.1

8.2

0.3

-7.2

-1.3

0.2

Group average

19.2

10.0

0.1

24.5

10.1

0.0

15.1

9.9

0.2

-9.4

-0.2

0.2

NORDIC EUROPE

SOUTHERN EUROPE
Greece

25.0

19.9

1.4

29.6

23.5

1.1

22.6

15.0

1.7

-7.0

-8.5

0.7

Italy

26.5

19.4

0.5

34.8

24.2

0.7

23.7

13.6

0.2

-11.1

-10.5

-0.5

Spain

32.6

18.4

1.3

37.9

19.5

1.1

29.2

17.1

1.5

-8.7

-2.4

0.4

Group average

28.0

19.3

1.0

34.1

22.4

1.0

25.2

15.3

1.2

-8.9

-7.1

0.2

Source: Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database, authors’ calculations.

erty rates for those with zero earnings, low earnings, andmedium-high earnings. We do so for all persons aged 25-59
and for men and women separately.
As with educational attainment, we find some universal
patterns: everywhere, for men and women alike, the riskof poverty falls as one’s own attachment to the labor market increases (from none, to low, to medium-high)—and thegradient is steep across all country clusters. Those with noearnings experience high rates of living in disposable income
poverty—on average, 29.7 percent in the Anglophone countries, 21.7 percent in the Continental European countries,
24.6 percent in the Eastern European countries, 19.2 percent

in the Nordic countries, and 28.0 percent in the Southern
European countries (see column A). In contrast, medium-highearners face much lower risks of poverty everywhere, typically poverty rates of 1 percent or less (see column C).
The final panel reveals that gender matters—especiallyamong those who are potentially more vulnerable to poverty.
Note that, in all 20 countries, among persons with no earnings, men are substantially more likely to be poor than are
their female counterparts (see column J). That finding reflects
persistent gendered divisions in paid work; women with noearnings are more likely to be partnered with (and sharing
household income with) earners than are men. Women with

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

poverty 23
no earnings are also more likely to have co-resident children,
so they are eligible for more income transfers conditioned on
the presence of children.
In the U.S., those with no earnings (as a group) are substantially more likely to be poor (37.9%) than are those withearnings in the bottom third of the distribution (21.3%). Nonearners are vastly more likely to live in poverty than are highearners (0.5%). That is a general pattern across this group ofrich countries.
Conclusion
In this report, we find that, using a relative poverty standard
and considering disposable household income, the U.S. poverty rate exceeds that reported in all of the other high-income
countries in our study, with the sole exception of Israel. At
the same time, the well-known exceptionalism of American
relative poverty is not a universal result; most of the middleincome countries in this study report higher relative poverty
rates than are seen in the U.S.
Our results help us to understand more fully what drives thecomparatively high rate of U.S. relative (disposable income)poverty. The high rate in the U.S. is driven more by meager
poverty reduction than by high market poverty rates. The only
countries that reduce poverty, via taxes and transfers, lessthan the U.S. does are four Latin American countries, Israel,
and Taiwan.
When we use the official U.S. poverty line—the “absolute”
line—as our anchor, our results shift. The absolute poverty rate (vis-à-vis disposable income) is, not surprisingly,
higher than it is in the U.S. in all 10 middle-income countries included here. Absolute poverty is also higher in 11
other high-income countries in our study—including all of
the Eastern and Southern European countries. What is more
surprising is that absolute poverty in the U.S. is higher thanin a core group of rich comparator countries. American poverty, using the U.S. line, exceeds that reported in nearly all of
the other Anglophone countries, as well as in all of the Continental and Nordic cases. All told, in cross-national terms,
especially compared to other rich countries, American poverty stands out—and that is true for both relative poverty andabsolute poverty.
We also find that child poverty is especially high in the U.S.
Using the most common indicator, relative disposable income
poverty, among the 20 rich countries included here, the U.S.
reports the highest percentage of children living in poverty.
One key finding is that U.S. tax-and-transfer policies reducechild poverty less than do policies in many other countries.
Likewise, we find that Americans living in single mother–headed households face the highest poverty rate amongour 20 study countries. Americans in two-parent households
also face a comparatively high risk of poverty—although the
U.S. outcome is not as exceptional as it is for single mother–headed households.
In addition, we find two general patterns across these study
countries: the risk of poverty falls as educational attainment
rises and as labor market attachment increases. In the caseof education, the gradient in the U.S. is comparatively steep(i.e., education is an especially important poverty preventiontool); with respect to labor market attachment, the U.S. gradient is not unusual.
Finally, our results indicate that national-level policies andinstitutions play a major role in shaping poverty outcomes.
Returning to our first table, and considering relative (disposable income) poverty, we see that, on average, theAnglophone countries “produce” more poverty (12.3%), than
do the Eastern European (10.8%), Continental (7.6%), andNordic countries (6.5%); they produce less relative poverty
than reported in the Southern European (13.5%) and Latin
American (19.9%) countries studied here. To close, we conclude that American policy makers should look abroad forlessons about poverty and poverty reduction—lessons thatare both inspirational and cautionary. ■Janet C. Gornick is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, andDirector of LIS, the cross-national data center in Luxembourg.
Markus Jäntti is Professor of Economics at the Institute for Social
Research, Stockholm University.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 201624

poverty

NOTES
1. For results based on the LIS data, see, e.g.,
Brady, 2009; Gornick and Jäntti, 2012, 2010,2009; Rainwater and Smeeding, 2003; also
see the LIS Inequality and Poverty Key Figures:
http://www.lisdatacenter.org/data-access/keyfigures/inequality-and-poverty/. See also OECD,
2015, 2011, 2008, and Eurostat, 2015.
2. We define market income (MI) as pre-taxpre-transfer income, and disposable household income (DHI) as post-tax-post-transfer
income. For convenience, we shorthand DHI
as “disposable income.” MI includes income
from labor, from selected sources of capital,
and from private transfers. DHI adjusts market
income by subtracting direct taxes paid out(i.e., income taxes and social contributions) andby adding the value of public transfers received.
(Counted income is not reduced to account for
non-discretionary expenditures other than direct
taxes.) Income in all households is adjusted forfamily size, using the widely-used “square root”
equivalence scale.
3. We use a tripartite education classificationin our analyses. Low educational attainment
includes those who have not completed upper
secondary education; medium refers to those
who have completed upper secondary education or non-specialized vocational education;and high includes those who have completed
post-secondary education, specialized vocational education, and beyond. LIS provides
standard recodes for most countries, based on
an international classification system. Where

LIS did not provide recodes, we constructed
them, adhering to these educational cutoffs as
closely as possible.
4. We define low earners as those whose annual
earnings fall in the bottom third of the earnings
distribution (among those with positive earnings) and medium-high earners as those in the
top two-thirds. These distributions are countryspecific and gender-specific.
5. U.S. results cited in this introduction arereported in Tables 2–5 in this report.
6. See www.lisdatacenter.org for a detailed
description of the Luxembourg Income Study(LIS) Database. The LIS Database contains
approximately 300 datasets from nearly 50
countries. The data are available in repeatedcross sections (1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000,
2004, 2007, 2010); as of this writing, LIS isnearing completion of the 2010 wave and has
started making available datasets from 2013.
7. In Tables 1 and 2, we use two different
poverty lines. The first one, the “relative” line,
is drawn at 50 percent of median DHI (where
the DHI-based line is used to calculate bothmarket income poverty and disposable income
poverty). The 50%-of-median line is countryspecific, meaning that “relative” poverty refers
to income relative to others in the same country.
The second one, the “absolute” line, is set
at the level of the U.S. poverty line, which isconverted to international dollars, adjusted forpurchasing power parities (PPPs). All results in

the rest of the tables pertain to relative poverty.
We define poverty reduction using a simple
accounting framework: it is the MI-based
poverty rate minus the DHI-based poverty rate.
8. The World Bank classifies all the world’s
countries as “high income,” “upper-middle
income,” “lower-middle income,” and “lowincome.” We use the terms “high-income countries” and “rich countries” interchangeably. We
use the term “middle-income” to refer to upperand lower-middle income countries.
9. For convenience, we use the term“American” as an adjective referring to
U.S. residents or conditions in the U.S. We
understand that not all U.S. residents are
American by nationality, and that the U.S.
is not alone in the Americas.
10. In Figure 1, the abbreviations are as follows:
Australia (AU), Brazil (BR), Canada (CA), Colombia (CO), Czech Republic (CZ), Denmark (DK),
Estonia (EE), Finland (FI), France (FR), Georgia(GE), Germany (DE), Greece (GR), Hungary(HU), Iceland (IS), India (IN), Ireland (IE), Israel(IL), Italy (IT), Luxembourg (LU), Mexico (MX),Netherlands (NL), Norway (NO), Panama (PA),Peru (PE), Poland (PL), Russia (RU), Serbia (RS),
Slovak Republic (SK), Slovenia (SI), South Africa(ZA), Spain (ES), Taiwan (TW), United Kingdom(UK), United States (U.S.).
11. Iceland and Norway are minor exceptions to
the pattern (with respect to disposable income
poverty).

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Brady, David. 2009. Rich Democracies, Poor
People: How Politics Explain Poverty. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Gornick, Janet C., and Markus Jäntti. 2012.
“Child Poverty in Cross-National Perspective: Lessons from the Luxembourg Income
Study.” Children and Youth Services Review 34:
558–568.
Gornick, Janet C., and Markus Jäntti. 2010.
“Women, Poverty, and Social Policy Regimes:
A Cross-National Analysis.” In Peter Saunders
and Roy Sainsbury (eds), Social Security, Poverty and Social Exclusion in Rich and Poorer

Countries. International Studies on Social Security - Volume 16, Antwerp: Intersentia, 63–95.
Gornick, Janet C., and Markus Jäntti. 2009.
“Child Poverty in Upper-Income Countries:
Lessons from the Luxembourg Income Study.”
In Sheila B. Kamerman, Shelley Phipps andAsher Ben-Arieh (eds), From Child Welfare toChild Wellbeing: An International Perspective
on Knowledge in the Service of Making Policy.
New York: Springer Publishing Company,
339–368.
Rainwater, Lee, and Timothy M. Smeeding.
2003. Poor Kids in a Rich Country. New York:PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

Russell Sage Foundation.
Organization for Economic Cooperation andDevelopment (OECD). 2015. In It Together: WhyLess Inequality Benefits All. Paris: OECD.
OECD. 2011. Divided We Stand: Why Inequality
Keeps Rising. Paris: OECD.
OECD. 2008. Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries. Paris:
OECD.
Eurostat. 2015. The EU in the World – 2015
Edition. Luxembourg: Publications Office of theEuropean Union.

S TAT E O F T H E U N I O N

head 25

safety net
The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality

BY KAREN JUSKOKEY FINDINGS• The U.S. safety net provides
about half of the income
support needed to increase
all incomes to the levelneeded to meet basic needs(measured here as 150% of
the official U.S. poverty line).
• Levels of poverty relief
are typically higher—andsometimes much higher—
in other post-industrial
countries.

It is one of the truisms of comparative
poverty scholarship that the UnitedStates (U.S.) is quite ungenerous in its
poverty policy. As is frequently argued,a main reason why there is so muchpoverty in the U.S. is not that the market itself generates an unusual amountof poverty, but rather that relatively little
in the way of post-market assistance isprovided to those in need. The evidence
on behalf of this claim is well-established; indeed, the chapter by Janet
Gornick and Markus Jäntti, as publishedin this report, provides clear and compelling evidence that social programsin the U.S. do not reduce “market poverty” to the extent that such programs inother well-off countries do.
We will build on this result by providing (1) a precise quantitative measure ofjust how much the U.S. safety net falls
short of meeting needs, and (2) a precise
assessment of how the U.S. compares
to its peers on this quantitative measure. The simple question here: To what
extent does the U.S. safety net meet thestandard set by other well-off countries?
Although we will provide new evidence,
then, on the overall performance of the
U.S. safety net, even more importantly
we will also provide new evidence on thetype of safety net that the U.S. has built.
In particular, there are two dimensions
that may be distinguished in characterizing a country’s safety net:

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

Baseline relief: How much basic
income support is provided to those
who are very poor (e.g., the “baseline
relief” parameter)?
Relief falloff: To what extent doesa country’s safety net incentivize
efforts to increase market income byminimizing the falloff in transfers asincome grows (e.g., the “relief falloff”
parameter)?
There are of course strong stereotypes
about where the U.S. falls on each ofthese two dimensions. That is, the conventional wisdom is not just that the U.S.
has a limited safety net, but also that it’slimited in a quite distinctive way. The
standard view in this regard is that the
U.S. provides little in the way of baseline relief, a policy decision that rests on
the view that, when such relief is set at
too high a level, it reduces the incentive to enter the labor market. The U.S.
safety net is also presumed to be basedon a distinctively low falloff parameter.
We’re said to like a slow falloff because
we want families to ramp up their market
earnings without facing the disincentiveof a large consequent loss in their program support.
The upshot is that, just as there’s a conventional wisdom about the (relatively
small) size of the U.S. safety net, so too
there’s a conventional wisdom about
the particular form our safety net takes.
The latter conventional wisdom has not,

26

safety net

however, been subjected to much in the way of empirical test.
This article provides that test by examining how a classic setof relatively well-off countries compare on each of these two
key safety net parameters.
This report thus addresses three questions for each of 13
well-off countries:
1. Are the overall benefits provided to low-income households substantial enough to meet basic needs?
2. How much support is provided to those householdswith no market income (“baseline support”)?
3. How quickly do benefits decline as income
increases (“relief falloff”)?
To address these questions, the LIS data set (formerly the
Luxembourg Income Study), a state-of-the-art resource forthe analysis of income and wealth, is used.1 The LIS comprises nationally representative data sets that have beenrevised and standardized to allow for reliable comparisons.
Given the objective of this report, it’s especially relevant thateach country-level data set has been supplemented withextensive documentation of the various social programs,
including eligibility criteria and typical benefit amounts.
FIGURE 1. Sources of Support for Low-Income Households

NorwayUK

The next section develops an approach to estimating theparameters indexing each of the two safety net dimensions,as well as the overall measure of safety net performance. In
the section that follows, a comparative analysis is then carried out with this approach, an analysis in which features of
the U.S. safety net are compared to 12 other well-off countries. The results will show that the U.S., when compared toother countries at similar levels of development, leaves significant needs unmet. The U.S. safety net provides the lowest
level of poverty relief among the 13 countries in our analysis,a relatively low level of baseline support, and a moderate rateof relief falloff. As will be shown, the conventional wisdom
about the U.S. safety net is roughly on the mark, not just withrespect to the overall amount of relief, but also with respect
to the way in which that small amount of relief is delivered.
Measuring Safety Net Effectiveness
The measures of safety net effectiveness that are used inthis report are derived from characteristics of the relationshipbetween household market income and overall amounts ofsocial transfers. As described in earlier research,2 we estimate parameters from a nonlinear analysis of the distributionof income support, as a function of market income. This analysis allows us to estimate a “poverty relief ratio,” designatedR, for each country. The value of R is the ratio of income support to the amount of support needed to increase all families’
incomes to a given poverty
threshold. Higher values on R
indicate more generous social
support (see Appendix for
more details).
US
The intuition behind this measure of “poverty relief” issimilar to that behind “poverty gap” measures. Bothmeasures allow analysts to
examine the extent to whichsocial programs fulfill unmet
needs. Here, I use the poverty
relief ratio because it offers
important analytic advantages
over the poverty gap measure,
three of which I’ll mention
here.
First, by using a total-income
approach, R recognizes theSocial InsuranceSocial Assistance

Other Programs

Source: LIS. This figure reports average annual amounts of monetary support, by program type, for households with no market income.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

safety net 27
full portfolio of programs on which low-income families often
rely. The key feature of R is that it refers to the amount of
support received and not the way in which that support isdelivered. There are wide cross-national variations in thetypes of programs on offer. For example, if social programs
are classified according to their eligibility criteria, three maintypes of programs may be distinguished, with countries differing substantially in their mix of types.
This point is demonstrated in Figure 1, where we report theshare of total monetary support that low-income households
in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Norway receive fromsocial insurance programs, social assistance programs, andother universal benefit programs. We see here that social
insurance programs, which generally require a history ofcontributions and provide support during labor market interruptions, provide support to varying degrees across the U.S.,
the United Kingdom, and Norway. Although all countries rely
heavily on social insurance programs for low-income households, we see that low-income households in the U.S. andthe United Kingdom also typically receive a substantial proportion of their income from means-tested social assistanceprograms. The U.S. and United Kingdom safety nets also
differ in that the United Kingdom relies more on benefits provided through programs that are not means-tested and are

TABLE 1. Assessing the Poverty Threshold

Percent
Low-Income

At-Risk-of-Poverty
Threshold

Australia

43$28,086

Canada39$23,581Germany

36$24,329

Denmark

38$24,656

Spain

61$15,895

Finland41$20,940

Greece70$14,028

Ireland53$19,614

Iceland37$21,173

Netherlands

24$25,940

Norway38$24,845

United Kingdom

48$21,998

U.S.

37$29,114

non-contributory (e.g., children’s benefits, universal pension
systems, or veterans’ benefits).3
What Figure 1 suggests is that, although social assistanceprograms are often most closely identified with the “safetynet” in public discussions, low-income households everywhere rely on a portfolio of programs for support. In somecountries, low-income households may rely just as much,and sometimes more, on social insurance programs and universal benefits. As a consequence, any analysis that focuseson one type of program (e.g., social assistance programs)
would provide a misleading assessment of the effectivenessof the social safety net in each country, and cross-national
comparisons would be similarly undermined. For this reason,
this analysis evaluates the effectiveness of the safety net ineach country by estimating the total amount of support provided to low-income households, relative to total need.
The second advantage of the poverty relief ratio is that, byusing a parametric framework (as described in the Appendix),
it is possible to distinguish between (1) levels of support provided to those with no market income (baseline support) and(2) the extent to which benefits decline with small increases
in earnings (relief falloff). When these two dimensions are distinguished, safety net programs can be classified into general
types, as will be done below.
The third advantage of the poverty relief ratio is that it maintains the rank order of country cases regardless of thepoverty threshold used. This property sets R apart from othermeasures of the effectiveness of the safety net (e.g., reduction in poverty rates). For the analyses reported below, thethreshold is set at 150 percent of the official U.S. poverty line
(150PL) in 2011, for a family of four ($33,525).
As seen in Table 1, when income is measured in a consistentcurrency (2011 USD), similar proportions of each national
population are identified as low-income. Low-income households comprise at least 39 percent of the population in morethan half of the countries included in this analysis; in Greeceand Spain, this proportion is substantially larger. Levels of
support are only weakly related to the size of the low-income
population.4 For each country, this threshold also exceeds
the standard “at-risk of monetary poverty” threshold, which
is often used in the analysis of European social policy. As aconsequence, it can be interpreted as a fully inclusive measure, capturing all of a country’s antipoverty efforts.

Note: This table reports the percent of households with total incomes less than the 150PL
threshold and an estimate of the “at-risk-of-poverty” threshold, or 60 percent of the reported
median income in each country.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

28

safety net

The Results
As a starting point, Figure 2 reports the overall relationshipbetween social transfers (all social insurance, social assistance, and other monetary benefits) and market income
for each country included in this analysis. It is immediately
apparent from Figure 2 that overall levels of support varyacross countries. Compare, for example, the amounts of“baseline” support provided to households earning no market income (at the left side of each graph). In the U.S., thesevery poor households receive an average of $18,595, while inAustralia, for example, a much higher level of baseline relief,$23,331, is provided. Countries also vary in the amount of
support provided to the relatively well-off. Households at
the $50,000 level in Norway receive an average of $6,746 in

FIGURE 2. Social Transfers and Market Income, by Country

CanadaDenmark

FinlandGermany

GreeceIceland

IrelandNetherlands

NorwaySpain

UK

0 10 20 30
0 10 20 30

Social Transfers ($1000s)

0 10 20 30

0 10 20 30

Australia

0

10

20

30

40

50

0

10

20

30

40

50

0 10 20 30

USA

0

10

20

30

40

50

Market Income ($1000s)
Social InsuranceSocial Assistance

Other Programs

Source: LIS. This figure reports average annual amounts of monetary support, by program type, for households at each market income level. Eachbar represents 1 percent of the national working-aged sample.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

safety net 29
transfers, whereas households at the same level in the U.S.
receive an average of only $3,368 in transfers. The U.S. bars
are of course distinctively low not just at the two extremes but
also throughout the interior of the curve.

relief, but benefit amounts decrease only slowly with small
increases in earnings. This type of safety net, represented
most closely by the case of Canada, doesn’t single out theextreme poor for special treatment. The contrast between
these first two types, represented by the difference between
Canada and Denmark, thus hinges mainly on the amountof aid delivered to the extreme poor. In liberal regimes, like
Canada, levels of baseline support are generally lower.

As seen in Figure 2, countries also vary in the rate at which benefits decrease as the household’s earnings increase, indeed
the difference in “relief falloff” is especially apparent in comparing Spain and the United Kingdom. The overall relationshipbetween social transfers and market income follows the samegeneral (negative binomial) pattern in each country includedin this analysis, with the largest amounts of support provided
to those with little or no market income, and amounts of support declining nonlinearly as income increases. Because ofthis general pattern, important aspects of the safety net canbe characterized and reliably compared with the parametersthat describe this relationship (see the Appendix for details).

Third, countries in the top right quadrant provide quite generous levels of support for those with no market income, but
the rate of relief falloff in these countries is relatively high.
This high falloff is typically presumed to reduce incentives
to increase market income. It is of course unsurprising that
Greece, which has long been criticized for such disincentives, provides the best example of this type.

The lower right quadrant pertains to safety nets with low
baseline support, but with steep falloff. It is perhaps surFigure 3 uses estimates of the parameters that describe theprising that the U.S. falls—albeit only barely—within thisrelationship between market income and social transfers toquadrant. To be sure, the low level of baseline support in theassess baseline support (vertical axis) and relief falloff (horizontal axis). Countries thattake higher values in baseline
support (e.g., Denmark) pro- FIGURE 3. Levels of Baseline Support and Relief Falloff
vide more generous transfers
to those households with nomarket income. In countries$26,000
with higher rates of relief falloff(e.g., Greece), however, beneDK$24,000
fits decrease more quickly withAU
small increases in earnings.

Second, the countries in thelower left quadrant provide lessgenerous levels of baseline

Baseline Support

When these dimensions of social
policy are plotted against eachother, the safety nets of the countries included in this study can
be classified in a straightforward
way. First, the top left quadrant
pertains to a safety net that provides relatively high levels ofbaseline support, combined withcomparatively low rates of relief
falloff. This quadrant represents,
then, an especially generous anduniform social safety net, with
Denmark providing the exemplar
here.

NL
DE
UK

$22,000$20,000

NO
IE

GR

US

ES

$18,000

ISFI$16,000

CA$14,000$12,000
$250

$500

$750

$1,000$1,250$1,500

Relief Falloff$1,750$2,000$2,250$2,500$2,750Source: LIS. This figure reports estimated parameters that pertain to levels of baseline support (i.e., average levels of support for those reporting
no income), and rates of relief falloff (i.e., the decrease in benefits with a $1,000 increase in earnings). Error bars report 95 percent confidence
intervals, estimated using the delta method. Solid lines report median values on each dimension. All amounts are reported in 2011 USD. The
countries included in this analysis are Australia (AU), Canada (CA), Denmark (DK), Finland (FI), Germany (DE), Greece (GR), Iceland (IS), Ireland(IE), Netherlands (NL), Norway (NO), Spain (ES), the United Kingdom (UK), and the U.S.

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30

safety net

FIGURE 4. Country Poverty Relief Ratios

US
CanadaGermany
FinlandUK
Spain
IcelandNetherlands
Australia
GreeceNorwayIrelandDenmark

0.00

0.25

0.50

Poverty Relief Ratio

0.75

1.00

Source: LIS. This figure reports estimates of overall poverty relief provided in each country as a proportion of total support needed to raise allincomes to 150 percent of the U.S. poverty line.

U.S. is expected, but one would not have hypothesized that
the U.S. would fall above the median on relief falloff. In interpreting this result, we should bear in mind that many othercountries (Australia, Germany, Iceland, Greece) fall yet further
to the right and thus have even steeper rates of relief falloff.
The relationship between social transfers and market income
can also be used to provide overall estimates of poverty relief.
Figure 4 reports the poverty relief ratio, using the 150PL poverty threshold. In the U.S. case, for example, this analysis
suggests that the safety net provides about 47 percent of the
support needed to provide for all basic needs. That is, thetotal amount of monetary support provided to low-income
Americans meets less than half of their economic needs, as
defined by the 150PL. For all other countries, levels of poverty
relief are higher, in some cases just slightly higher (e.g., 54%
in Canada) and in other cases substantially higher (e.g., 77%
in Denmark).

Implications
This report suggests that the U.S. safety net is, for the mostpart, delivering in a way consistent with its reputation. The
overall amount of poverty relief is the lowest among the 13
countries in our analysis; the baseline level of support is the
fourth lowest among our countries; and the rate of relief falloff
is just slightly above the median level.
How might one evaluate such results? If one likes the type ofsafety net that the U.S. is purported to have, then one might
be pleased with these results. If, on the other hand, one prefers a safety net that provides more relief, then of course
these results would be judged as distressing. ■Karen Jusko is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She leads the Safety Net Research Group at the
Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

safety net 31
Appendix: Data Processing and Estimation Notes
The analysis presented here is based on the following specification of the relationship between social transfers (T) andmarket income (Y):Tij = αj+ β1j exp(β2jYj) + eij(1)

The index i = 1…n denotes households in states j = 1…J. The
parameters αj > 0, β1j > 0, and β2j < 0 describe the bivariate
relationship within each state, and eij is a stochastic residual
term. This function is identified with the restriction that β1j andβ2j do not equal zero.
The level of support needed to increase households’ income
to the poverty threshold, ψ, is given by the equation:
Tij =ψ−Yij(2)

Next, the poverty relief ratio is defined as the ratio of the area
under the curve defined by Equation 1 to the area defined by
Equation 2:
τ

R=

Ψ

∫0 α+β1∙exp(β2 MI)∂MI+∫ τ ψ-MI∂MIΨ

∫ 0 ψ-MI ∂MI(3)“Baseline support” is estimated with the expression αj+β1j, orthe expected value of T when Y equals zero.
“Relief falloff” is estimated as β1j(1 − exp(β2j), or the expecteddifference in levels of support provided to no-income households, and households earning $1,000 per year.
Parameters are estimated by nonlinear least squares. Estimates of τ are generated using a line-search strategy.
Social transfers (T) include all monetary benefits provided
through social insurance, social assistance, and other benefit
programs that are reported in LIS data. (Support for post-secondary education and the costs of medical care are excluded.)Market income (Y) includes wages and salaries, as well as
earnings from self-employment, investments, and dividends,
pensions and social security payments, alimony and childsupport, and veterans’ payments.
All calculations are based on 2011 thousands of U.S. dollars, for non-standard households, headed by working-aged(25–59) adults.

(The variable τ represents the point at which these curvesintersect.)

NOTES
1. Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database,
http://www.lisdatacenter.org (multiple countries;2010). Luxembourg: LIS.
2. Jusko, Karen Long. 2008. “The Political
Representation of the Poor.” Ph.D. dissertation,
Department of Political Science, University ofMichigan. Jusko, Karen Long and Katherine
Weisshaar. 2015. “Measuring Poverty Relief.”
Working Paper.

3. Note that while these measures of poverty
relief, baseline support, and relief falloff provide
a comprehensive assessment of monetarytransfers provided through public programs andreported in LIS data, these measures also omit
important aspects of support that take the formof non-monetary support or that are provided
through private organizations.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

4. The correlation between overall levels ofpoverty relief and the proportion of workingaged “low-income” households with earnings
less than $33,525 is 0.12.

S TAT E O F T H E U N I O N

income inequality
The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality

BY JONATHAN FISHER AND TIMOTHY M. SMEEDING

KEY FINDINGS• When disposable-income
inequality is measured across
20–35 years of survey data,
the consistent result is that
the U.S. has the highest
level of disposable-income
inequality among richcountries.
• The U.S. has the largest“social distance” gap
between households at
the 90th percentile andhouseholds at the 10th
percentile in the income
distribution. The U.S. has
the highest 90th percentile
point, meaning our rich areindeed better off than thosein other countries, as almost
everyone expects. But ourpoorest, at the 10th percentile,
are also lower in real terms
than are the poor in all othercomparison countries save
Italy.
• Some countries haveexperienced periods offalling, as well as rising,inequality over the last three
decades. The simple, but
important, conclusion to
draw is that rising income
inequality is not inevitable.
Policy and markets can bothmake a difference.

The explosion of research on income
inequality in the United States has
uncovered key facts about the sources andpatterns behind the takeoff. We know, forexample, that the long-term trend in income
inequality has been driven by two main factors: a surge at the top end in income andwealth; and, at the bottom end, a combination of reduced wealth and slower income
growth during good times and a fall inincome during bad times. We likewise know
a lot about the role of education, technology,
deunionization, and globalization in bringing
about the takeoff in income inequality in the
U.S.
Although there has also been much crossnational comparative research on income
inequality, this line of research is somewhat less well-known and will therefore be
the focus of our article. The comparative
approach works well to expose the distinctiveness of the U.S. We live, of course, in a
famously exceptional country, but nowhereis the U.S. more exceptional than in its levelof economic inequality.1

By examining cross-nationally comparable
measures of income inequality, we can movebeyond the often parochial debates about
U.S. inequality and come to appreciate how
our distinctive institutions create distinctive outcomes. Also, by comparing recent
trends in inequality across several nations,
we can better understand what U.S. policy
has and has not achieved and, more importantly, how it might be made more effective.
We can also better understand the effects
of extreme inequality on mobility, economic

growth, and other outcomes we value.
Measurement
We measure income inequality in termsof disposable cash income (DPI), which isadjusted for household size and (a) includes
all types of money income, (b) subtracts
out direct income and payroll taxes, and(c) reflects all cash and near cash transfers,
such as food stamps, cash housing allowances, and refundable tax credits (e.g.,
the Earned Income Tax Credit [EITC]).2 We
measure inequality in DPI with the Gini coefficient and the ratio of the 90th to the 10th
percentiles in the distribution. The Gini coefficient measures inequality on a scale from0 to 1, with higher numbers representing
greater inequality. We also measure redistribution by comparing the Gini for pre-tax
and transfer “market income” (MI) to thatof DPI. By calculating the Gini for market
income, we are able to “take out” the directrole of the government, via taxes and transfers, in influencing inequality.
Our analyses are based on 10 rich nations
with well-established welfare states: theU.S.; the Anglo-Saxon nations of Australia,
Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland;
France, Italy, and Germany; and two Scandinavian countries, Norway and Sweden. We
employ data from the LIS data set (formerly
the Luxembourg Income Study) and theOECD Income Distribution Database (IDD).3
In an online appendix table, we expand
the analyses of MI and DPI inequality to 33
nations, including several middle-income
countries (Online Appendix Figure A1).

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

income inequality 33
Cross-National Differences in Absolute and Relative
Inequality
We begin by comparing the level of inequality across our 10
countries for the latest year that is available in the LIS. We doso for both market income and disposable personal income.
The countries in Figure 1 are ranked from low to high by theGini coefficient for disposable income. In all countries, theGini coefficient for disposable income exhibits less inequality than the Gini coefficient for market income, as taxes andtransfers redistribute income to lower-income households.
The difference between the Gini coefficients for market
income and disposable income, is in this sense, a measure of
the level of redistribution in each country. We find that the U.S.
and Canada have the least redistribution, but the disposableincome Gini for Canada is substantially below that for the U.S.
because Canadian market-income inequality is much lower.
As compared to other countries in Figure 1, we see that the
U.S. has very high market-income inequality, although Ireland
has yet higher market-income inequality and Italy, the United
Kingdom, France, and Germany have roughly the same levelof market-income inequality as the U.S. The U.S. nonetheless ends up with the highest disposable-income inequality
because it engages in relatively little redistribution. Although

Ireland has considerably more market-income inequality
than the U.S., it engages in substantially more redistribution
and thus ends up with substantially less disposable-income
inequality.
The U.S. has had the highest level of disposable-income
inequality among rich countries for some time. When disposable-income inequality is measured across 35 years of LIS
data or 20 years of IDD data, the consistent result is that the
U.S. has the highest level of disposable-income inequality
among rich countries, even when the comparison is extended
to include a more expansive set of countries than those in
Figure 1 (see Online Appendix Figure A1 for the expanded
comparison). As shown in Figure A1, only the middle-income
countries of Russia, Turkey, Mexico, and Chile have higher
disposable-income inequality than the U.S. The simple
conclusion: The U.S. is the world champion of disposableincome inequality among rich nations.

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The foregoing measures of income inequality are not, ofcourse, affected by cross-national differences in mean
income. Critics of this relative approach to inequality often
argue that absolute living standards should also be taken
into account. Because the U.S. is richer than almost all otherOECD countries, those at agiven percentile in the income
FIGURE 1. Market and Disposable Income Inequality by Country Using the Gini Coefficient
distribution—say, the 10th percentile—may well be better off
in absolute terms than thoseat the same percentile in otherrich countries.4

Disposable Income

Market Income

Note: 2012 or latest year available. Disposable income is market income plus transfers and minus taxes.
Source: LIS (formerly the Luxembourg Income Study) (LIS; www.lisdatacenter.org) and The Organisation for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment’s (OECD) Income Distribution Database (http://www.oecd.org/social/income-distribution-database.htm).

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

This proposition can beassessed with LIS data by usingpurchasing power parities toconvert all country incomes
into equivalent U.S. dollars.5
Using purchasing power parities allows us to compare reallevels of well-being at various
points in the income distribution across nations. For thispurpose, perhaps the mostbasic measure of real levels of inequality is the decile
ratio, which shows the “social
distance” gap between thehousehold at the 90th percentile
and the household at the 10th
percentile in the income distribution.

34

income inequality

When this approach is taken, we find that the U.S. has thehighest decile ratio (see Figure 2). It also has the highest 90th
percentile point, meaning our rich are indeed better off thanthose in other countries, as almost everyone expects. But ourpoorest, at the 10th percentile, are also lower in real terms
than are the poor in all other countries save Italy.6 The highdecile ratio in the U.S. is generated, then, not just because
the rich are especially well off, but also because the poor areespecially poor. The combined effect is to generate a U.S.
decile ratio of more than 6, meaning the incomes of thoseat the 90th percentile are, on average, six times higher thanare those at the 10th percentile.7 The next highest ratios are
below 5 in Australia and Canada, while the French, Swedes,
and Norwegians have decile ratios below 4. Indeed, our decile
ratio is roughly twice that of Norway, whose level of GDP perperson is just about the same as ours. The poor in Norway(i.e., 10th percentile) enjoy more than twice the real incomesof the poor at our 10th decile.
The U.S. is, therefore, the most unequal rich country onearth, a conclusion that holds equally for absolute or relative
measurement. Were we always the most unequal? The next
section addresses this question.

Trends in Income Inequality
Table 1 and Figure 3 present changes in disposable income
inequality from the 1980s through 2010, the earliest and latest
comparable information we have on these countries. We findthat the U.S., while starting from a very high level of inequality,
has also experienced one of the largest increases in inequality since 1979 (18%). The United Kingdom has seen a similarrise (21%), and Australia (17%) and Germany (17%) are closebehind the U.S. (Table 1). But Sweden, for which data are firstavailable in 1981, has had the fastest increase in both absolute and relative inequality, though from a very low base. We
also see that France, Germany, and Sweden ended up withroughly the same level of inequality in 2010, despite their very
different pathways since 1980 in achieving that level (Figure3). Indeed, France has experienced an 11 percent decrease
in inequality (since 1978), while Germany and Sweden haveexperienced an increase during that period. The U.S. datasuggest a return to rising income inequality after a recessioninduced pause, whereas post-2010 data for other nations are
not yet available for comparison.8
One lesson from Figure 3, also shown in Table 1, is that somecountries—in particular, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Ire-

90th percentile ($10,000s)

10th percentile ($10,000s)

2

4

6

90-10 Ratio

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FIGURE 2. Income Inequality by Country Using the 90th and 10th Percentiles in U.S. Dollars

Note: Data are from 2010 or latest year available. Income definition is disposable household income from LIS. Income is in equivalent dollars using the square root of family size as the equivalence
scale. Data for all countries except Sweden come from LIS. The data for Sweden come from OECD, but the OECD does not report the levels for the 90th and 10th percentiles, just the ratio. Figures areadjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) differences using OECD PPP numbers.
Source: LIS; OECD.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

income inequality 35
land, and France—have experienced periods of falling, as
well as rising, inequality over the last three decades. The simple, but important, conclusion to draw is that rising income
inequality is not inevitable. Policy and markets can both makea difference.
But the dominant result is, of course, one of rising inequality. The descriptive source of this trend is twofold: at the top
end, there has been a surge in high incomes; and at the bottom end, there has been much slower income growth during
good times and, in some cases, a fall in income in bad times.
Further, changes in labor and capital markets since 2000 havecombined to narrow and shrink the middle class in the U.S.
and in other nations.9 In OECD countries, taxes and benefits
have historically been effective in reducing inequality, especially in the decade prior to the Great Recession. In the midstof the Great Recession, benefits for the unemployed and otherredistribution measures managed to at least partially stem therise in inequality generated by the market. But now, as we
finally emerge from the Great Recession, the fear is that theeffect of taxes and benefits has become weaker, accelerating
the overall upward trend in disposable-income inequality. Thispattern is visible in some, but not all, rich countries.10

First Year

Last Year

Absolute
ChangePercent
ChangeUnited States

1979

2010

0.058

18.0%

Australia

1981

2010

0.050

16.7%

Canada

1981

2010

0.031

10.3%

France1978

2010-0.038-11.4%

Germany

1981

2010

0.044

16.9%

Ireland

1987

2010

-0.026

-7.8%

Italy

1989

2010

0.007

2.3%

Norway

1979

2010

0.022

8.7%

Sweden

1981

2005

0.089

43.4%

United Kingdom

1979

2010

0.059

20.8%

Note: Income definition is disposable household income. Income is in equivalent dollars using
the square root of family size as the equivalence scale.
Source: LIS; OECD.

Trends in the Gini Coefficient Using Disposable Income.4

FIGURE 3.

TABLE 1. Trends in Gini Inequality Since 1978

.35

United States (18% Increase).25

Gini coefficient.3

United Kingdom (21% Increase)

France (11% Decrease)

Germany (17% Increase).2

Sweden (43% Increase)
1980

1990

2000

Note: Income definition is disposable household income. Income is in equivalent dollars using the square root of family size as the equivalence scale.
Source: LIS; OECD.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

2010

36

income inequality
for large intergenerational transfers of wealth to assure thesocial position and status of one’s children.14

Income and Wealth
We have concluded to this point that the U.S. is the “mostunequal rich country on earth.” Does this conclusion holdwhen the focus shifts to wealth inequality? Although Gabriel
Zucman covers wealth inequality in detail in the next chapterof this report, a brief head-to-head comparison of the wealthand income results will be revealing here.11 The OECD has
garnered comparable wealth inequality data that allow us to
examine the income and wealth shares of the top 10 percent
in each of our major nations except Ireland (see Figure 4).12

Why Do We See These Patterns?
The data observed here suggest that inequality is high and rising in most rich nations—especially, but not only, in the U.S.
The drivers of these changes are rooted in several decades ofglobalization of trade, technological change, and the growthof both high- and low-end service jobs. Because labor markets have always been the heart of market income for middle
class households, the foregoing changes—all of which haveprofound implications for the labor market—have had a major
impact on earnings and incomes in the U.S. and elsewhere.15

We clearly see that the U.S. is far and away the country withthe most unequal wealth distribution. The top 10 percent in
the U.S. have about 80 percent of all net worth, compared to
60 percent in Germany and Sweden, and 50 percent or lessin each of the other nations. It follows that the U.S. not only
has the weakest safety net but that the poor also have little
in the way of personal savings to cushion drops in income or
to meet unexpected expenses. The top decile, by contrast,
can easily self-insure against economic risks, afford its own
health care and education, and opt out of public sector provision of social goods.13 This amassing of wealth, which has
grown more unequal in recent years in the U.S., also allows

Income and Wealth Shares

90

FIGURE 4.

These changes have implications for those at both the top
and bottom of the labor market. At the top, the rise of highdemand business services and of winner-take-all markets
dominated by the well-educated have led to substantial
increases in earnings for the “winners,” thus leading to apulling-away at the top. Meanwhile, at the other end of thelabor market, wages of workers with low skills have not kept
up, and manual jobs in goods production and distribution(manufacturing, assembly, and shipping) constitute a fall-

Top 10% Share - Wealth

Note: 2012 or latest year available.
Source: OECD. 2015. In It Together: Why Less Inequality Benefits Us All. Paris: OECD Press; Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS).

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

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income inequality 37
ing proportion of total employment. In some countries (esp.
Germany), “permanent employment” labor market institutions have been able to forestall widespread unemployment
in these sectors, even since the Great Recession. But even inthese countries, there are rises in inequality due to changes
at the high end of the earnings scale.16 Because the U.S. isbuilt around a low-wage market, with relatively high numbersof short-term and part-time jobs, the changes at the bottomof the labor market are especially important.17
We have also seen changes in income tax systems that have
reduced marginal tax rates for high earners. According to
the OECD,18 taxes and benefits have tended to redistributeless in the period from the mid-1990s up to the Great Recession. It follows that rising inequality is generated not just by
institutional changes in labor markets, but also by declining
redistribution.
Where to Go from Here?
As long as the U.S. relies almost exclusively on the job market to generate incomes for working-age families, economicchanges that reduce the earnings of less-skilled workers will
inevitably have a big negative effect on inequality among children and prime-age adults, the vast majority of whom havelittle wealth. This means that if the U.S. wishes to reduce
inequality, it can either (a) alter its labor market institutions toensure that there are more workers and that workers are paid
better, or (b) alter its redistributive institutions to reduce its
reliance on the job market.
If the U.S. fails to alter its policies in either of these ways,
the implications of such inaction would seem to be clear. The
high direct and indirect costs of inequality are now becoming widely recognized in public debates, both nationally andcross-nationally.19 Because of high inequality, U.S. economic
growth and human capital growth have been lower and far
below expectations. And social mobility in the U.S. is much
lower than in other rich nations (as Miles Corak discusses in
his chapter).20 Although many economists favor globalizationand free trade because—in the aggregate—the gains fromtrade exceed the losses, the key problem under this formulation is developing institutions that allow the many winners(who pay lower prices for higher quality goods) to compensate the losers (whose jobs are lost to imports). The obvious
point here is that—to date—the winners have not compensated the losers.
The further worry is that a high-inequality economy reduces
the amount of social mobility and opportunity. As many haveargued, inequality can affect growth and upward mobility by
reducing educational opportunities for children from poor andlower-middle-class families, thus lowering their future earnings and incomes. It follows that inequality reduces social
mobility and overall growth because of slow skill development.21 In the U.S., rich parents provide a “private safety net”
for their children, thus circumventing the problems arisingfrom low levels of public support for education, health care,or other institutions. This private safety net allows rich children to exploit opportunities and thus reduces mobility andeconomic growth.
Up to now, the U.S. has shown its indifference to high andrising levels of inequality, although the outcry for change has
recently grown louder and more insistent. This brief report
has made it clear that ever-rising inequality is not inevitable,that declining mobility is not inevitable, and that rich countries have in fact made choices about their labor-market
policies and their levels of redistribution. Although the highlevels of inequality in the U.S. are the residue of past choices,
there have of course been historic moments in U.S. history inwhich new pathways have been charted and new policies andinstitutions have been introduced. We cannot rule out that a
moment of this sort is nearing in which the U.S. adopts moreprogressive policies that reduce inequalities and promote thegeneral welfare. ■Jonathan Fisher is Research Scholar at the Stanford Center on
Poverty and Inequality. Timothy M. Smeeding is Arts & Sciences
Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the
University of Wisconsin.

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38

income inequality

NOTES
1. On American exceptionalism, see Kenworthy, Lane. 2015. “America is Exceptional… andOrdinary.” The Good Society. Available at http://
lanekenworthy.net/america-is-exceptional/.
2. In-kind transfers in the form of health andeducation benefits are not counted, nor are
indirect taxes. For an analysis of cross-national
income inequality that includes these items, see
Garfinkel, Irwin, Lee Rainwater, and Timothy
Smeeding. 2006. “A Reexamination of the Welfare State and Inequality in Rich Nations: How
In-Kind Transfers and Indirect Taxes Change theStory.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 25(4), 855–919.
3. Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg,
available at http://www.lisdatacenter.org/;OECD Income Distribution Database (IDD):
Gini, Poverty, Income, Methods and Concepts,
available at http://www.oecd.org/social/incomedistribution-database.htm.
4. For instance, see Wilkinson, Will. 2009.
Thinking Clearly about Economic Inequality.
Policy Analysis, No 640. Washington, D.C.:
Cato Institute. Available at http://object.cato.
org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa640.pdf.
5. Purchasing power parities (PPP) allow comparison of incomes across countries. Thus weare able to convert all income to U.S. dollars
in order to compare incomes across countries.
Our PPP data come from the OECD.
6. All data in Figure 2 come from LIS, except
for Sweden, which comes from the IDD. The
IDD only publishes the 90-10 ratio and not theactual values at the 90th percentile and 10th
percentile.
7. See also Keeley, Brian. 2015. Income
Inequality: The Gap between Rich andPoor. OECD Insights. Paris: OECD Publishing. Available at DOI: http://dx.doi.
org/10.1787/9789264246010-en. He finds
even bigger differences by examining average
incomes in the top and bottom deciles.

8. LIS key figures, available at http://www.
lisdatacenter.org/lis-ikf-webapp/app/search-ikffigures.
9. Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD). 2015. In It Together:
Why Less Inequality Benefits All. Paris: OECD
Publishing. Available at DOI: http://dx.doi.
org/10.1787/9789264235120-en; Gornick,Janet, and Branko Milanovic. 2015. Income
Inequality in the United States in Cross-National
Perspective: Redistribution Revisited. LIS Center Research Brief (1/2015). Available at https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNYGraduate-Center/PDF/Centers/LIS/LIS-CenterResearch-Brief-1-2015.pdf; and Pew ResearchCenter. 2015. “The Lost Decade of the Middle
Class: Fewer, Poorer, Gloomier.” Washington,
D.C.: Pew Research Center. Available at http://
www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/08/22/the-lostdecade-of-the-middle-class/.
10. OECD, 2015.
11. See Fisher, Jonathan, David Johnson, Jonathan Latner, Timothy Smeeding, and Jeffrey
Thompson. 2016. “Inequality and Mobility Using
Income, Consumption, and Wealth for the Same
Individuals.” Russell Sage Foundation Journalof the Social Sciences, forthcoming.
12. The reader should be aware that the top
income and wealth shares are each calculated
from different databases, so that the top 10 percent are different households in each database.
Fisher et al. (2016), in contrast, examine wealthincome and consumption in the U.S. for thesame persons.
13. Osberg, Lars, Timothy Smeeding, andJonathan Schwabish. 2004. “Income Distribution and Public Social Expenditure: Theories,
Effects, and Evidence.” In Social Inequality(K. Neckerman, Ed.). New York: Russell Sage
Foundation.

14. Yellen, Janet L. 2014. “Perspectives on
Inequality and Opportunity from the Surveyof Consumer Finances.” Presentation to theConference on Economic Opportunity andInequality, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
October 17, 2014. Boston. Available at http://federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/yellen20141017a.htm (last accessed December 5,2015); Fisher et al. (2016).

15. Autor, David. 2014. “Skills, Education, andthe Rise of Earnings Inequality Among the ‘Other 99 Percent’.” Science 344(1866), 843–851.
16. Haveman, Robert, Carolyn Heinrich, andTimothy Smeeding. 2011. “Policy Responses
to the Recent Poor Performance of the UnitedStates Labor Market.” Journal of Policy Analysis
and Management, 31(1), 177–186.
17. National Employment Law Project. 2012.
The Low-Wage Recovery and Growing Inequality. Data Brief. New York: NELP. Available at
http://www.nelp.org/content/uploads/2015/03/
LowWageRecovery2012.pdf.
18. OECD, 2015.
19. OECD, 2015; Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2014.
“Focus on Inequality and Growth – December 2014.” Paris: OECD. Available at http://
www.oecd.org/social/Focus-Inequality-andGrowth-2014.pdf; Kenworthy, Lane, and Timothy Smeeding. 2014. “The United States: Highand Rapidly Rising Inequality.” Inequality and
Its Impacts, Volume 2 (Brian Nolan and Wiemer
Salverda, et al., Eds.). New York: Oxford University Press.
20. See also Corak, Miles. 2013. “Income
Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility.” Journal of Economic
Perspectives 27(3), 79–102.
21. Figure 1.6 in OECD, 2015.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

S TAT E O F T H E U N I O N

head 39

wealth inequality
The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality

BY GABRIEL ZUCMANKEY FINDINGS• Over the past four decades,
only the very rich, the top 0.1
percent, have realized wealthincreases in the U.S. In 2012,
the top 0.1 percent included
160,000 households with total
net assets of more than 20
million.
• At the same time, themiddle class, those in the
50th-90th percentiles, haveexperienced a decline in theirwealth share.
• Available data indicate that
there is significantly lesswealth inequality in Europe
than in the United States. No
other country analyzed has
top wealth shares as high as
the U.S.

W

ith the takeoff in income inequality by now well-known, attention
has shifted of late to trends in wealthinequality. Until recently, it had been difficult to gather empirical evidence on
wealth inequality. However, important
new evidence on wealth inequality has
now become available, evidence thatsuggests that wealth concentration isrising fast in the U.S. and has reachedlevels last seen only during the Gilded
Age. According to the latest available
data, in 2012 the top 1 percent owns 42
percent of total U.S. wealth, up from 25
percent in the 1970s.1
The simple purpose of this article is to
ask how such wealth inequality, which
would appear to be quite extreme,
compares to that of other developed
economies. Has there been a takeoff
in wealth inequality in other countries?
Is it as spectacular as the takeoff in the
U.S.? Does the current level of wealthinequality in other countries match thecurrent level in the U.S.? We take onquestions of this sort in this article.
What Is Wealth?
To compare the distribution of wealthacross countries, it is of course critical touse the same definition of wealth acrosscountries. Wealth is defined as the current market value of all the assets owned
by households, net of all their debts.
Following international standards codified in the System of National Accounts,
assets include all the non-financial andfinancial assets over which ownershiprights can be enforced and that provide

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

economic benefits to their owners.
This definition of wealth includes all pension wealth—whether held in individual
retirement accounts or through pension
funds and life insurance companies—
with the exception of Social Security
and unfunded defined benefit pensions.
It excludes all promises of future government transfers. Including such transfers
is analytically difficult because thesetypes of assets lack observable market
prices. The wealth definition excludes
human capital for this same reason.
New Data Sources on WealthInequality
With this definition in hand, wealth concentration can be studied using different
data sources.2 The ideal source would
be high-quality wealth tax declarations
for the entire population, with extensive
and truthful reporting by financial institutions, domestic and foreign. No country
in the world has such a perfect data
source today. However, France, Spain,
the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland all impose direct-wealth taxes thatgenerate useful data on wealth. Amongthese countries, Norway’s data are of thehighest quality, as extensive information
on most assets is collected for all Norwegians (whether subject to the wealthtax or not). Although Denmark stopped
taxing wealth in 1997, it also still collects
detailed full-population administrative
data on wealth.
Other tax data can be used to estimate
wealth indirectly. There are two main

wealth inequality
assets and assets at the bottom of the wealth distribution thatare not covered in tax data.

approaches here. First, estates and inheritance tax returns
provide information about wealth at death.3 From thesesources, one can infer how wealth is distributed across theliving population, using the method known as the “mortality multiplier,” which was invented shortly before World War
I by British and French economists.4 Second, one can use
individual income tax returns and capitalize the dividends,
interest, rents, and other forms of capital income declared onsuch returns. Drawing on the detailed U.S. income tax data
and Financial Accounts balance sheets, Emmanuel Saez and
I recently used the capitalization technique to estimate the
distribution of U.S. wealth annually since 1913,5 as discussed
below.

For all their promise, surveys also face two main limitations:(1) they are not available on a long-run basis, and (2) they raise
serious difficulties regarding measurement at the top of the
distribution. The wealthy are hard to reach in surveys (sampling error), and even those who respond may underestimate
their wealth (non-sampling error). As a result, surveys are notrepresentative of the richest individuals. In the Dutch wealthsurvey, for instance, there are only two individuals with morethan €2 million in net wealth.7 This is a serious issue because
wealth is very concentrated (much more so than income). The
richest 10 percent typically own between 60 percent and 80
percent of aggregate wealth. Thus, to properly study crosscountry patterns in wealth inequality, it is critical to pay carefulattention to those at the very top, and this leads us away fromfull reliance on surveys.

Wealth inequality can also be studied using surveys. In the
U.S., the Survey of Consumer Finances is available on a triennial basis from 1989 to 2013. In the euro area, the Household
Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) provides harmonized micro-data on euro-area households’ wealth andconsumption. The development of wealth surveys has led toa new wave of comparative studies that attempt to modelthe distribution of wealth from the bottom—including groups
with negative net wealth—to the top.6 The key advantage ofsurveys is that they include detailed socio-demographic data
and wealth questionnaires that allow us to measure broad
sets of assets for the entire population, including tax-exempt

FIGURE 1.

However, tax sources also raise difficulties at the top, especially for the recent period, given the large rise of the wealthheld in offshore tax havens such as Switzerland, the Cayman
Islands, Singapore, and so on.8 The wealthiest individuals
have incentives to hide assets. Evidence from Norway suggests that offshore tax evasion at the very top can have asignificant effect on inequality measures, even in countries
with otherwise high-quality administrative data on wealth.

Top 0.1% Wealth Share in the U.S., 1913-2012

20%

15%

10%

2013

2008

2003

1998

1993

1988

1983

1978

1973

1968

1958

1953

1948

1943

1938

1933

1928

1923

0%

1918

5%

1913

Percent of Total Household Wealth

25%

1963

40

Note: This figure depicts the share of total household wealth held by the 0.1% richest families, as estimated by capitalizing income tax returns. In
2012, the top 0.1% includes about 160,000 families with net wealth above $20.6 million. Source: Saez and Zucman, 2016, Appendix Table B1.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

wealth inequality 41
gate wealth of U.S. households. In this way, we obtain annual
estimates of U.S. wealth inequality stretching back a century.

Given the limitations of all existing data sources, one needs tobe pragmatic and combine the various available data sources.
Some countries, such as France and the U.S., attempt tointegrate household wealth surveys with administrative tax
data. Recently, Philip Vermeulen has proposed using a list ofrich individuals, such as the Forbes 400 in the U.S. and similar
rankings abroad, to improve survey data and better capture
the top tail of the distribution.9

U.S. wealth inequality, it turns out, has followed a spectacular
U-shaped evolution. From the Great Depression in the 1930s
through the late 1970s, there was a substantial democratization of wealth. The trend then inverted, with the share of total
household wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent increasingfrom 7 percent in the late 1970s to 22 percent in 2012. In themost recent data, the U.S. top 0.1 percent includes 160,000
households with total net assets of more than $20 million.

In this report, I combine the available data to provide evidence
on how the U.S. compares to other countries. However, thereader should keep in mind that the available data on wealthare of disparate—and in many cases very insufficient—quality. To quantify wealth inequality, I will focus upon simple
concentration indicators such as the Gini coefficient, and theshare of aggregate wealth going to the top 10 percent, top 1
percent, and top 0.1 percent of households by wealth.

Figure 1 shows that wealth inequality has exploded in the
U.S. over the past four decades. The share of wealth held by
the top 0.1 percent of households is now almost as high as
in the late 1920s, when The Great Gatsby defined an era that
rested on the inherited fortunes of the robber barons of the
Gilded Age.

Wealth Inequality in the U.S.
It is useful to begin by considering what we know about
wealth inequality in the U.S. Emmanuel Saez and I construct
top wealth shares,10 by year since 1913, using comprehensive data on the capital income reported on individual income
tax returns—such as dividends, interest, rents, and business profits. We capitalize this income so that it matches theamount of wealth recorded in the Federal Reserve’s Financial
Accounts, the national balance sheets that measure aggre-

FIGURE 2.

In recent decades, only a tiny fraction of the population saw
its wealth share grow. While the wealth share of the top 0.1
percent increased a lot in recent decades, that of the next 0.9
percent (i.e., 99–99.9) did not. And the share of total wealthof the “merely rich”—households who fall in the top 10 percent, but are not wealthy enough to be counted among the
top 1 percent—actually decreased slightly over the past four
decades. In other words, $20 million fortunes (and higher)

The Decline of Middle Class Wealth in the United States (Composition of the Bottom 90% Wealth Share)

40%

30%
25%

Pensions

20%
15%

Equities & fixed claims(net of non-mortgage
debt)

Business assets

10%

2012

2007

2002

1997

1992

1987

1982

1977

1972

1967

1962

1947

1942

1937

1932

1927

1922

1917

0%

1957

Housing (net of mortgages)

5%

1952

Percent of Total Household Wealth35%

Note: This figure depicts the share and composition of the wealth held by families in the bottom 90% of the wealth distribution, as estimated bycapitalizing income tax returns. Source: Saez and Zucman, 2016, Appendix Table B5.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

42

wealth inequality
grew much faster than smaller fortunes in the single-digit millions.

TABLE 1. Wealth Distribution: U.S. vs. Norway

The distribution of houshold wealth in Norway and the United Statesin 2012, based on tax data
% of net household wealth at market value
NorwayU.S.
Bottom 50%

1.2%

2.5%

50%–90%

48.7%

20.3%

Bottom 90%

49.9%

22.8%

Top 10%

50.1%

77.2%

Top 1%

17.9%

41.8%

Top 0.1%

8.0%

22.0%

Top 0.01%

3.6%

11.2%

Note: This table shows the distribution of household wealth in Norway and the United States in
2012, based on tax data. Source: Norway: Alstadsæter, Johannesen and Zucman (2016) using
wealth reported to tax authorities. U.S.: Saez and Zucman (2016) using capitlized income tax
returns, and bottom 50% US obtained by Kennickell (2009, Figure A3a) for 2007 using the SCF.

TABLE 2. Wealth Inequality in the Euro Area

Gini
coefficient
Australia

Top 1%
share

Top 10%
share

13.3

44.9

Austria

0.762

24.0

61.7

Belgium

0.608

12.6

44.1

15.5

50.3

CanadaCyprus0.698

Denmark

25.0

Finland

0.664

12.4

45.0

France

0.679

18.0

50.0

Germany

0.758

24.5

59.2

Greece

0.561

8.5

38.8

Italy

0.609

14.3

44.8

Luxembourg

0.661

22.4

51.4

Malta

0.600

Netherlands

0.654

23.9

59.6

17.9

50.1

NorwayPortugal

0.670

21.3

52.7

Slovak Republic

0.448

7.9

32.9

Slovenia

0.534

Spain

0.580

15.2

43.5

Sweden57.6

United Kingdom

17.5

46.6

United States

41.8

77.2

Source: U.S.: Saez and Zucman (2016); Norway: Alstadsæter, Johannesen and Zucman (2016);
top shares for other countries: OECD wealth distribution database; Gini coefficients: Cowell and
Van Kerm (2015), Table 2.

The flip side of these trends at the top of the wealth ladder isthe erosion of wealth among the middle class and the poor.
This erosion challenges the widespread notion that rising
middle-class wealth constituted a key structural change inthe U.S. economy, due to the development of pensions andthe rise in home ownership rates. Figure 2 shows that while
the share of wealth of the bottom 90 percent did gradually
increase from 15 percent in the 1920s to 36 percent in the
1980s, it dramatically declined thereafter. In the most recent
data, the bottom 90 percent collectively owns just 23 percent
of total U.S. wealth, about as much as in 1940.
In every country and historical period for which we have data,
the share of aggregate wealth owned by the bottom 50 percent is extremely small, usually less than 5 percent. That is,assets are overall only slightly greater than debts across thebottom half of the distribution. This means that a decline in
the wealth share of the bottom 90 percent can be interpreted
as a decline in the wealth share of the “middle class,” that is,
the 50th–90th percentiles.
Contrasting the U.S. to Scandinavia
How does the U.S. compare to other countries? Because
Scandinavian countries have the most comprehensive dataon wealth, Scandinavia is a good starting point in addressing
this question. In a recent paper, Annette Alstadsæter, Niels
Johannesen, and I study the country that currently has thebest administrative wealth data: Norway.11
We exploit administrative wealth tax records that cover theentire population of Norway, whether subject to the tax
or not. Just like in the U.S., we include all forms of assets
and liabilities at market value, so that our distributional figures cover 100 percent of the (recorded) aggregate wealthof households. Because we use the same concept of aggregate wealth in Norway as in the U.S., we can meaningfullycompare wealth inequality in the two countries. Our unit ofanalysis is the household, as in the U.S. Households aredefined as those headed by a single person age 20 or above
or by a married couple.
Table 1 shows that wealth is much more equally distributed in
Norway than in the U.S. today. In both countries, the bottom
50 percent of the distribution owns almost no wealth in total(its debts are as big as its assets), a key regularity across theworld. But the top half of the distribution looks markedly different. The Norwegian middle class owns close to half of all
wealth, versus just 20.3 percent of all wealth in the U.S. case.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

wealth inequality 43
In the U.S., the top 0.1 percent owns as much wealth as thebottom 90 percent does. In Norway, the top 0.1 percent shareis much smaller (8.0%).
Both the U.S. and Norwegian top shares are likely to be substantially underestimated, because tax data fail to capture
the wealth held in offshore tax havens. Accounting for thiswealth would, we estimate, raise the top 0.1 percent wealthshare by half in Norway (to about 12%), erasing part of the
gap with the U.S.—but only part of it.
The trends for the other Scandinavian countries are similar. In
Denmark, for instance, historical wealth concentration data
exist from as early as 1789 and then more frequently during the 20th century. Danish wealth concentration decreased
over the course of industrialization, and this continued
throughout the 20th century. Today, the top 1 percent wealthshare (~25%) is a bit higher in Denmark than in Norway, but it
is not clear if this difference reflects a real economic phenomenon or measurement limitations.12 In any case, the Danish
top 1 percent share is far lower than that in the U.S.
Continental Europe and Other Countries
In most Continental European countries, wealth inequality
comparisons are available only via survey data. Table 2 presents Gini coefficients computed from the HFCS. The HFCS
aggregates euro-area surveys, some of which have serious
deficiencies. The results accordingly
should be interpreted with care.

What the data suggest more clearly,
however, is that no country has top
wealth shares as high as the U.S.
Table 2 reports top 10 percent and top
1 percent wealth shares from a large
number of OECD countries, whichhave very recently been published by
the OECD. There is a considerable
gap between the top 1 percent wealthshare of the U.S. (41.8%) and all otherOECD countries. The same is true forthe top 10 percent. Although it is likelythat the top shares of many European

FIGURE 3.

This has not always been the case. In the 19th century, theU.S. was to some extent the land of equality, at least for whitemen. Wealth concentration was much less extreme than inEurope (except in the southern U.S.). Over the course of the20th century, this was reversed, and wealth concentration is
now significantly higher in the U.S., as shown in Figure 3.
Conclusions
In the introduction to this article, two key questions about thestructure of cross-national variability in wealth inequality wereposed, questions that have been taken on here. It is useful toconclude by reiterating the answers to these questions.
Is the distribution of wealth more extreme in the contemporary
U.S. than in other well-off countries? Given limitations in data
quality and comparability, real caution is in order in answering this question. But the available data suggest that, as withso many other poverty and inequality outcomes, the level of
wealth inequality in the U.S. is quite exceptional. If one compares the U.S. to Scandinavian countries, where the data areof high quality, it is clear that wealth inequality is much more
extreme in the U.S. If one instead compares to all euro-area

Top Wealth Shares, Europe vs. U.S., 1810-2010

100%

Share of Top Decile or Percentile in Total Wealth

As Table 2 shows, the Gini coefficientfor net wealth ranges between 0.45
(Slovakia) and 0.76 (Austria and Germany). Data limitations make it hard tosay whether these differences reflect
real economic phenomenon or measurement issues.

countries countries are underestimated in Table 2 (due to the
problems noted above with survey data), the gap seems too
big to be entirely due to measurement errors. There is significantly less wealth inequality in Europe today than in the U.S.

90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
Top 10% wealth share: Europe20%

Top 10% wealth share: U.S.
Top 1% wealth share: Europe

10%
0%
1810

Top 1% wealth share: U.S.

1830

1850

1870

1890

Source: Piketty and Zucman, 2015.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

1910

1930

1950

1970

1990

2010

44

wealth inequality

countries, the top wealth shares in the U.S. are still unusuallyhigh, although in this case the comparisons have to rest on
lower-quality survey data.
Has there been an equally spectacular takeoff in wealthinequality in all countries? The evidence reveals a much more
extreme takeoff in wealth inequality in the U.S. than in the
euro-area countries. The rapid takeoff in the U.S. has reversed
the U.S.-Europe ranking on wealth inequality: That is, whereas
wealth concentration was once much less extreme in the U.S.
than in Europe, now it is much more extreme in the U.S. thanin Europe.
The emergence of extreme wealth inequality in the U.S.
may be understood as the realization of long-standing concerns about the underlying dynamics of change in the U.S.
It is notable that U.S. economists of the early 20th century
were very concerned about the possibility that their country
had become as unequal as Old Europe. Irving Fisher, thenpresident of the American Economic Association, gave his
presidential address in 1919 on this topic. He argued that theconcentration of income and wealth was becoming as dangerously excessive in America as it had been for a long timein Europe. He called for steep tax progressivity to counteract this tendency. Fisher was particularly concerned that asmuch as half of U.S. wealth was owned by just 2 percent ofAmericans, a situation that he viewed as “undemocratic.”13
One can interpret the spectacular rise of tax progressivity that
occurred in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century as
an attempt to preserve the egalitarian, democratic American
ethos, celebrated a century before by Tocqueville and others.
It might accordingly be imagined that, given that the U.S.
now has higher levels of wealth inequality than Europe, there
would be profound pressures to install a more progressive tax
system in the U.S. The pressure to do so is in fact quite limited. Why? The key complicating development in this regard
is that attitudes towards inequality are dramatically different
today. Many U.S. observers now view Europe as excessively egalitarian, and many European observers view the
U.S. as excessively unequal. There has in this sense been agreat reversal not just in objective levels of wealth inequality
but also in attitudes about the appropriate “target levels” ofwealth inequality.
This change in the desired target level is likely to be consequential. If the growth in wealth concentration in the U.S. is
now understood as unproblematic (rather than “undemocratic”), then of course it may well continue apace. ■Gabriel Zucman is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California–Berkeley.

NOTES
1. Saez, Emmanuel, and Gabriel Zucman.
2016. “Wealth Inequality in the United States
Since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income
Tax Returns.” Quarterly Journal of Economics,
forthcoming.
2. Piketty, Thomas, and Gabriel Zucman.
2015. “Wealth and Inheritance in the Long
Run.” Handbook of Income Distribution, 2,1303–1368.
3. The difference between inheritance and estate taxes is that inheritance taxes are computed at the level of each inheritor, whereas estatetaxes are computed at the level of the total
estate (i.e., total wealth left by the decedent).
4. The “mortality multiplier” weights wealthat-death by the inverse of the mortality rate
conditional on age, gender, and wealth, in orderto generate estimates for the distribution of
wealth among the living population.

5. Saez and Zucman, 2016.

9. Vermeulen, 2016.

6. For a survey article using HFCS data for
15 euro-area countries, see Cowell, Frank A.,
and Philip Van Kerm. 2015. “Wealth Inequality:
A Survey.” Journal of Economic Surveys,
671–710.

10. Saez and Zucman, 2016.

7. Vermeulen, Philip. 2016. “How Fat Is the Topof the Wealth Distribution?” mimeo.
8. Zucman, Gabriel. 2013. “The Missing
Wealth of Nations: Are Europe and the US Net
Debtors or Net Creditors?” Quarterly Journalof Economics, 128(3), 1321–1364; Zucman,
Gabriel. 2014. “Taxing Across Borders: Tracking
Personal Wealth and Corporate Profits.” Journalof Economic Perspectives, 28(4), 121–148;
Zucman, Gabriel. 2015. The Hidden Wealthof Nations. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

11. Alstadsæter, Annette, Niels Johannesen,
and Gabriel Zucman. 2016. “Tax Evasion andInequality,” mimeo.
12. Roine, Jesper, and Daniel Waldenström.
2015. “Long-Run Trends in the Distributionof Income and Wealth.” Handbook of Income
Distribution, 2A.
13. Fisher, Irving. 1920. “Economists in PublicService.” American Economic Review, 9, 5–21.

S TAT E O F T H E U N I O N

head 45

education
The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality

BY ANNA K. CHMIELEWSKI AND SEAN F. REARDONKEY FINDINGS• There is considerable
variation across highly
developed countries in theextent to which students fromhigh-income families havehigher academic test scoresthan students from lowincome families (the “income
achievement gap”).
• The income achievement
gap in the United Statesis quite large relative tothe 19 other Organization
for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD)
countries examined here.
• Countries with higher levelsof poverty, inequality, andeconomic segregation(among schools) tend to havelarger income achievementgaps.
• Countries with lessdifferentiated education
systems and more
standardized curricula
generally have smaller
income achievement gaps.

T

he United States is an outlier onmany measures of inequality. When
compared to other well-off countries,
it has unusually high levels of income
inequality, unusually high levels of
wealth inequality, and unusually high levels of poverty. The purpose of this article
is, in part, to ask whether the “income
achievement gap”—the test score gap
between children from high- and lowincome families—is also unusuallyhigh in the U.S. This gap is importantbecause it reflects (a) the extent to which
students experience different socioeconomic conditions in their early childhoodand different schooling conditions once
they reach school age, and (b) the
extent to which these socioeconomic
and schooling context differences leadto different educational outcomes (testscores, in this case). It may accordingly
be understood as an early (albeit obviously imperfect) measure of the extent towhich opportunities are unequal.
Although a main purpose of this article issimply to establish how the U.S. stacks
up against its peer countries on this key
measure of unequal opportunity, our follow-up objective is to cast some light on
the sources of international differences inthis measure. We examine, in particular,
whether income inequality is an important source of the achievement gap. The
evidence from the U.S. is at least suggestive of an “income inequality” effect:
In the 1980s and 1990s, as income
inequality in the U.S. grew sharply, so
too did the academic achievement gap
by family income. That family income

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

and family socioeconomic status (SES)
are related to children’s academic
achievement is not surprising; that thisrelationship grew so rapidly in the U.S.
in the last several decades, however, israther surprising. The U.S. trends suggest that some of this growth may havebeen the result of rising income inequality.
As one way of investigating the relationships between income inequality,
school system characteristics, and theincome achievement gap, we examine
data from multiple countries with widely
varying levels of income inequality andschool institutional structures. We investigate the association between the sizeof a country’s income achievement gap
and a host of characteristics, including
its poverty and inequality levels, welfare
policies, parental support policies, andnational school system policies.
The Income-Achievement
Association in the U.S.
The income achievement gap in the
U.S. grew by roughly 40 percent
between cohorts of students born inthe mid-1970s and those born in 2000
(although the gap appears to have thendeclined by 15 percent in the subsequent decade). During this same period,
income inequality among families withchildren grew sharply in the U.S., which
is why one instinctively turns to income
inequality as a source of the trend.
However attractive the income inequality hypothesis may be, it does not seem46

education

to be straightforwardly driving the U.S. income achievement
gap. This is because the type of changes in U.S. income
inequality do not match up well with the type of changes
in the U.S. achievement gap: Income inequality grew in the
1970s and 1980s largely because of stagnation at the bottomof the income distribution among families with children, while
the income achievement gap grew mostly as children fromfamilies in the top half of the income distribution pulled awayfrom their lower-income peers.
Still, income inequality may drive income achievement gaps
indirectly through other social policies and conditions, suchas a weakening social safety net, inadequate support forparents and families, and increasing segregation of neighborhoods and schools by income. Evidence from the U.S. showsthat the income achievement gap is very large when children
enter kindergarten and does not widen much between kindergarten and grade 12. This suggests that broader social
FIGURE 1. Estimated 90/10 Income Achievement Gaps in Reading,

It is difficult to adjudicate among the many possible explanations for increasing income achievement gaps using
information from only the U.S. Examining income achievement gaps in other developed countries with widely varying
income inequality, social conditions, and welfare and educational policies sheds new light on growing achievement
disparities.

United States (ECLS-K)
GreeceSlovak Republic
Germany
Slovenia
New Zealand
Canada (Quebec)
England
Canada (Ontario)
Netherlands
NorwaySwedenIceland

The evidence in Figure 1 is quite striking: The U.S. gaps
for both elementary and secondary school rank among thelargest across the available countries. Gaps in the U.S. arecomparable in size to those of Portugal, Luxembourg, Hungary, and Belgium (Flanders). The countries with the smallest
income achievement gaps are Iceland, Norway, Sweden,
Poland, and Denmark.

Luxembourg
Portugal
United States (ECLS-K)
Germany
New Zealand
Korea
PolandDenmark
Iceland

The estimated gaps in elementary school appear somewhat
smaller than those for secondary school, but this may be an
artifact of our samples of countries for each study. There arevery few overlapping countries across the elementary and secondary school studies; the only four countries in our sample
for which we have data for both levels are Germany, Iceland,
New Zealand, and the U.S. In our U.S. data, consistent withprior evidence from the U.S., the gaps are roughly the same
size in elementary and secondary school. In the other three
countries, we observe the same pattern. There is no evidence
that gaps are markedly larger in secondary school than in elementary school. Thus, both U.S. and international evidence
suggest that broader social conditions may play a larger rolein the income achievement gap than do schools.

PISA 2009PIRLS 2001

The Income-Achievement Association in Cross-National
Comparison
We compare the U.S. to the 19 other developed countries
for which we could obtain information both on students’ academic achievement in either reading or math in elementaryor secondary school and their household income.1 For eachcountry and study, we estimate the average difference in testscores between students at the 90th and 10th percentilesof the household income distribution within their respective
country and cohort. Figure 1 shows the estimated reading
achievement gaps, measured in terms of standard deviations,for each of the countries in our sample.

PISA 2006

2001–2012

conditions may play a larger role in the income achievement
gap than do schools.

PISA 2012

Denmark
New Zealand
Poland
Korea

Korea
0.00

0.25

0.50

Portugal
Germany
Hungary

Belgium (Flanders)
Hungary
Portugal
Germany

0.75

1.00

1.25

1.50

90/10 Income Achievement Gap (sd's) (95% CI)

1.75

Note: Elementary school estimates are based on the Progress in International Reading Literacy
Study (PIRLS) reading tests administered to 4th graders in 2001; secondary school estimatesare based on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reading tests
administered to 15-year-olds in 2006, 2009, or 2012.

The Effects of Inequality
We turn next to the task of casting some light on the sourcesof this cross-national variation. We do so by examining therelationships between income achievement gaps and vari-

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

education 47
ous country characteristics. It is natural to lead off, as wehave in Figure 2, by examining the simple bivariate association between country-level income inequality and income
achievement gaps.
In this and all subsequent figures, we pooled elementary andsecondary school achievement gaps in all available subjects
and averaged the country characteristics across years withineach country. The size of each circle indicates the precisionof each achievement gap estimate, with the larger circles indicating the most precisely estimated gaps. Each of Figures 2 to
6 includes two fitted lines. The solid red line is the precisionweighted regression line through the 20 data points. Because
the U.S. has extreme values on some of the country characteristics and because the gap data for the U.S. come from adifferent data source, we also fit precision-weighted regression lines that exclude the U.S. This allows us to examine
whether the fitted lines are heavily influenced by the presence of the U.S in the sample. The estimates based on these
regressions are shown as dashed blue lines in each figure.
We hypothesized that countries with higher income inequality
would have larger income achievement gaps; Figure 2 showsa modest positive association between the two. Some of thecountries with large income achievement gaps, notably the
U.S. and Portugal, have very high levels of income inequality; others, such as Luxembourg and Belgium (Flanders),
have moderately low levels of income inequality. Most of thecountries with the smallest income achievement gaps are
Scandinavian countries with low levels of income inequality.
Poland, however, has both moderately high income inequality

FIGURE 2. Association Between Income Achievement Gap and Income

and low income achievement gaps.
This evidence, like that pertaining to trends within the U.S.,
does not suggest a straightforward relationship between
income inequality and income achievement gaps. But income
inequality may drive gaps indirectly through other social conditions that are correlated with (or caused by) income inequality.
In developed countries, income inequality is strongly correlated with child poverty rates (because a high poverty rate in arich country implies substantial income inequality), as well asother sequelae of poverty and inequality, such as high rates ofteen childbirth, high rates of low birthweight, and high levelsof segregation by income among schools.
We examine each of these characteristics in turn and findthat all are, as predicted, positively associated with income
achievement gaps. Figures 3 and 4 present the results for thetwo strongest associations: the association with child poverty
and that with income segregation (among schools). Both relationships remain strong (or grow stronger) when the U.S. is
excluded from the sample, an important finding given that its
child poverty and income segregation measures are very highrelative to the other OECD countries.
Although the association of income segregation and theincome achievement gap is strong, the mechanisms that produce this association are not obvious. Because residential andschool segregation are correlated, it is not clear whether thisassociation arises from school segregation (and inequalitiesin school quality associated with segregation) or residential
segregation (and inequalities in environment and opportunities associated with residential segregation). The relationships
between the rates of teen childbirth and low birthweight andincome achievement gaps are positive but weaker.

Inequality, 2001–2012

90/10 Income Achievement Gap (sd's)

1.50
Luxembourg

Portugal
Belgium (Flanders)
Hungary

United States

1.25
Germany
GreeceSlovak Republic
Slovenia

1.00

New ZealandEngland

Canada (Quebec)
Canada (Ontario)

The Effects of Policy
The “direct approach” to reducing the size of the achievement gap is simply to reduce the amount of income inequality
in a society. If indeed the gap is mainly a function of income
inequality (and its sequelae), then a society could in principle
opt to reduce the gap by reducing the amount of inequality.
The rationale for doing so is that one cannot easily deliverequal opportunities to children when the resources available
to their parents are so grossly different.

Korea

0.75

Denmark

Netherlands

PolandNorwaySwedenIcelandFitted Line (Precision-weighted)

0.50

Fitted Line w/o US (Precision-weighted)

0.20

0.25

0.30

Income Inequality (Gini Index)

0.35

The alternative “indirect approach,” however, is to leavesuch inequalities intact but devise state policies that at least
reduce their effects. There are two main candidate policies inthis regard: social welfare policy and parental support policy.
We expect that countries with strong social welfare policy can
reduce the effects of income disparities by “decommodifying”

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

48

educationachievement-enhancing resources. That is, insofar as such
resources are provided to all families regardless of income,then the effects of income on achievement will presumably
be reduced (without reducing the amount of income inequality itself). We constructed an index of social welfare policythat included public health expenditures, public spending onfamily benefits in cash, public spending on family benefits inservices, and pre-primary school enrollment rates.
We also constructed an index of parental support measuring(albeit crudely) the extent to which a country requires paid
parental leave following the birth of a child. We would havepreferred a more general measure of early childhood support pertaining to social policies that support families withyoung children and that provide educational opportunities foryoung children. We would of course expect a reduction in thesize of the achievement gap when children from poorer families tend to have parents at home during infancy and havemore educational opportunities prior to enrolling in primaryschool. However, the only policy measures we were able toobtain were measures of parental leave policy, hence we were
obliged to construct our index using (a) the maximum number
of weeks of leave for mothers, (b) the number of weeks ofpaternity leave for fathers, (c) the paid leave full-rate equivalent pay for mothers, and (d) the paid leave full-rate equivalent
for fathers.
Both the social welfare policy index and the parental support
index were, as expected, negatively associated with income
achievement gaps, but the relationships are weak (results notshown here). We are not confident, however, that the social
welfare policy and parental support indices were sufficiently

well-defined to capture the true relationship of social policies to income achievement gaps. The upshot is that, on thebasis of the data available to us, the viability of a policy-based
response remains very unclear.
The Surgical Approach
We conclude by examining a third and more “surgical”
approach to reducing the size of the gap. If a country opts
against both direct reductions in inequality, as well as against
various types of “decommodifying” policies that reduce theeffects of money, it may instead attempt to surgically intervene in the way in which education itself is delivered.
As such, we next examine the relationship between income
achievement gaps and features of national educational systems. International research describing the institutional
structures of educational systems often focuses on two key
dimensions: differentiation and standardization. Differentiation, which pertains to whether students are placed in different
curricular tracks on the basis of ability or prior achievement,
may reproduce social class differences if lower-SES students
are overwhelmingly assigned to lower tracks (either becauseof low prior performance or discrimination). Within lower
tracks, educational expectations are lower, and curricula andinstruction target less advanced academic skills, thus reducing achievement. In contrast, standardization of resources
and curricula may produce greater homogeneity of educational quality across schools.
We created an index of differentiation measuring the extent
to which the educational system is structured to provide
highly differentiated learning environments for students. We

FIGURE 3. Association Between Income Achievement Gap and Child

FIGURE 4. Association Between Income Achievement Gap and Income

Poverty Rate, 2001–2012

Segregation, 2001–2012

1.50
Luxembourg
Belgium (Flanders)Portugal

Hungary

United States

1.25
Germany

GreeceSlovak Republic

Slovenia

1.00

England
NewCanada
Zealand(Quebec)
Canada (Ontario)
Korea
Denmark

0.75

Netherlands

PolandNorwaySwedenIcelandFitted Line (Precision-weighted)

0.50

Fitted Line w/o US (Precision-weighted)

0.00

0.05

0.10

0.15

Child Poverty Rate

0.20

90/10 Income Achievement Gap (sd's)

90/10 Income Achievement Gap (sd's)

1.50

Portugal

Luxembourg

Belgium (Flanders)
Hungary

1.25

United States

Germany
GreeceSlovak Republic
Slovenia

1.00

New ZealandEngland

Canada (Quebec)

Canada (Ontario)
Korea
Netherlands

Denmark
PolandNorwaySweden0.75

IcelandFitted Line (Precision-weighted)

0.50

Fitted Line w/o US (Precision-weighted)

-2.0

-1.0

0.0

1.0

2.0

Income Segregation Among Schools (Standardized)

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

education 49
reason that a more differentiated system—one with high levels of tracking and a large private school sector—may leadto greater stratification of students both between and within
schools. If this stratification is associated with family socioeconomic background (as it generally is), more differentiation
may contribute to widening academic achievement disparities. The index includes the proportion of students in private
schools, the proportion of secondary school students invocational tracks, the number of distinct tracks in secondary school, and the age at which students are first tracked(with lower ages implying greater differentiation). Figure 5
shows the relationship between this differentiation index andincome achievement gaps. The relationship is strongly positive, as expected, and becomes even stronger when the U.S.
is excluded.
To measure curricular standardization, we use a commonlyused proxy for standardization: the proportion of secondary
school students required to take curriculum-based, highstakes external exit exams. Such exams are typically createdby a centralized educational authority and are used to determine whether students receive a secondary school diploma.
Because they incentivize schools to focus on a common curriculum to which the tests are tied, they lead to standardized
curricula. The measure ranges from 0 in countries with nocentralized exams to 1 in countries where all students takecentralized exams (and falls somewhere in between for countries with regional variation in exam policies). Figure 6 showsthat, as predicted, the relationship between centralized
exams and income achievement gaps is negative. It follows
that there is also evidence—obviously only suggestive—for amore surgical approach to reducing the gap.

Multivariate Analyses
Many of the country characteristics examined above arestrongly associated with one another. For example, countries
with high income inequality also tend to have high levels ofchild poverty, high levels of school income segregation, andweaker social welfare and parental support policies. Countries with higher levels of school income segregation also tend
to have lower levels of curricular standardization. The lattercorrelation may be generated through two possible causal
pathways: in highly segregated places, people may demand
more local control; or, conversely, in countries with more local
control, families have more incentive to segregate by income.
A set of multivariate models (not shown here) predicting
income achievement gaps as a function of our full set of
national characteristics and educational policies indicatethat the strongest independent predictors of gaps are school
income segregation, educational differentiation, and curricular standardization.2 These three factors together account forroughly 60 percent of the variance in the income achievement
gap in our sample of 20 OECD countries. These results are
consistent with a process in which (a) income inequality leads
to wider income achievement disparities, largely throughits effects on income segregation, and (b) the association
between income and academic achievement is exacerbatedby high levels of educational differentiation and low levels of
curricular standardization.
If one were to take these results literally (and we of course
caution against doing so), it would imply that there are various potential policy strategies for reducing the size of theincome achievement gap. The direct approach of reducing

FIGURE 5. Association Between Income Achievement Gap and

FIGURE 6. Association Between Income Achievement Gap and CurricularDifferentiation Index, 2001–2012

Standardization (Proportion Taking Centralized Exit Exams), 2001-2012

1.50
Portugal

Luxembourg

Belgium (Flanders)

Hungary

United States

1.25

Germany
Greece1.00

90/10 Income Achievement Gap (sd's)

90/10 Income Achievement Gap (sd's)

1.50

Slovak Republic
Slovenia

Canada (Quebec)
New ZealandEngland
Canada (Ontario)
Korea

Netherlands

Denmark
Poland0.75

NorwaySwedenIceland

0.0

1.0

2.0

Hungary

1.25
Germany
GreeceSlovak Republic
Slovenia

1.00

New ZealandEngland

Canada (Quebec)
Canada (Ontario)

Korea
Netherlands
Denmark
Poland0.75
SwedenNorwayIcelandFitted Line (Precision-weighted)

0.50

Fitted Line w/o US (Precision-weighted)

Educational Differentiation Index

Luxembourg

United States

Fitted Line (Precision-weighted)

0.50
-1.0

Portugal
Belgium (Flanders)

3.0

Fitted Line w/o US (Precision-weighted)

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

Proportion of Students Taking Centralized Exit Exams

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

50

education

income inequality would suffice insofar as doing so leads tocorollary reductions in school segregation. Alternatively, one
might reduce segregation even while leaving the amountof income inequality intact, perhaps through zoning, housing, or school assignment and school choice policies. And,
finally, there may also be payoff to “surgical” interventions inschools themselves, interventions that might focus on reducing educational differentiation and/or increasing curricular
standardization.
Conclusion
There is much variation among wealthy countries in the extent
to which children from richer and poorer households do wellon standardized tests. We can conclude that, just as various
economic outcomes (e.g., income, wealth) are very unequallydistributed in the U.S. (relative to the OECD norm), so too
are opportunities for academic achievement very unequallydistributed. We have also shown that the achievement gap isrelated to income inequality, segregation, and features of theeducational system. If we wanted, in other words, to reduce
the size of the achievement gap in the U.S., this evidence
at least suggests that there are various ways to make that
happen.

And there is indeed good reason to care about the achievement gap. Most importantly, cross-national differences inincome achievement gaps may have implications for patterns of social mobility in different countries, although we
did not test that possibility here. If school performance (asproxied by performance on standardized tests) is an important mechanism for upward mobility, then we might expect
socioeconomic attainment (whether measured by educational attainment, occupational status, or income) to be morestrongly correlated with parental income in countries withlarge income achievement gaps. Income achievement gaps
might therefore be one mechanism underlying the association
between economic inequality and social mobility documented
in international research. ■Anna K. Chmielewski is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Toronto. Sean F. Reardon
is Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education and Professor(by courtesy) of Sociology at Stanford University.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Bol, Thijs, Jacqueline Witschge, Herman Van deWerfhorst, & Jaap Dronkers. 2014. “Curricular
Tracking and Central Examinations: Counterbalancing the Impact of Social Background on
Student Achievement in 36 Countries.” Social
Forces, sou003.

Organization for Economic Cooperation andDevelopment (OECD). 2013. PISA 2012 Results:
Excellence Through Equity: Giving Every
Student the Chance to Succeed (Volume II).
Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development.

Association Between Income and Academic
Achievement.” Paper presented at Income,Inequality and Educational Success: New
Evidence about Socioeconomic Status andEducational Outcomes, May 15–16, 2012,
Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

Breen, Richard, & Jan O. Jonsson. 2005.
“Inequality of Opportunity in Comparative
Perspective: Recent Research on Educational
Attainment and Social Mobility.” Annual Review
of Sociology, 31, 223–243.

Reardon, Sean F. 2011. “The Widening Academic-Achievement Gap between the Rich and
the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations.” In G. J. Duncan & R. J. Murnane (Eds.),
Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools,
and Children’s Life Chances. New York: Russell
Sage Foundation.

Schmidt, William H., Nathan A. Burroughs,
Pablo Zoido, & Richard T. Houang. 2015. “TheRole of Schooling in Perpetuating Educational
Inequality An International Perspective.” Educational Researcher, 44(7), 371–386.

Chudgar, Amita, & Thomas F. Luschei. 2009.
“National Income, Income Inequality, and theImportance of Schools: A Hierarchical CrossNational Comparison.” American Educational
Research Journal, 46(3), 626.

Reardon, Sean, & Anna K. Chmielewski. 2012.
“New Cross-National Evidence on Trends in the

Van de Werfhorst, Herman G., & Jonathan J.
B. Mijs. 2010. “Achievement Inequality and theInstitutional Structure of Educational Systems:
A Comparative Perspective.” Annual Review ofSociology, 36, 407–428.

NOTES
1. We define developed countries as OECDmembers with GDPs per capita of at least$20,000 in 2012. For elementary school
income achievement gaps, we use data fromthe 2001 Progress in International Reading
Literacy Study (PIRLS), which tested fourth
grade students in reading. For secondary
school income achievement gaps, we use datafrom the 2006, 2009, and 2012 Programme
for International Student Assessment (PISA)

studies, which tested 15-year-old students
in reading, math, and science. Both theelementary and secondary school studies alsocollected annual household income before
taxes from parent surveys. Because the U.S.
did not participate in the parent surveys,
we estimate its elementary and secondary
school income achievement gaps using datafrom the Early Childhood Longitudinal StudyKindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). ECLS-K tested

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016a nationally-representative sample of U.S. third
graders in reading and math in 2002 and again
as eighth graders in 2007.
2. After controlling for other country characteristics, the relationship between income inequality and income achievement gaps is weak.

S TAT E O F T H E U N I O N

head 51

economic mobility
The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality

BY MILES CORAKKEY FINDINGS• When compared to 24
middle-income and highincome countries, the U.S.
ranks 16th in the amount ofintergenerational earnings
mobility.
• The relatively low level ofmobility in the U.S. may arisein part because low-income
children in the U.S. tend tohave less stable and lowerincome families, less securefamilies, and parents who
have less time to devote totheir children.

It is often claimed that there is muchtolerance in the U.S. for high levels
of inequality, as long as that inequality arises from a fair contest in which all
children, no matter how poor or rich theirparents, have the same opportunities
to get ahead. This formula, insofar as itproperly describes U.S. sensibilities, puts
a premium on assessing whether indeed
opportunities to get ahead in the U.S.
depend much on one’s starting point.
The standard way to assess whether the
U.S. is living up to its high-mobility commitment is to compare rates of mobility
across countries. This exercise, when
carried out with the best available data,suggests that in fact the United States
is a rather low-ranking country when it
comes to intergenerational economic
mobility.
The purpose of this report is to examine and re-examine this international
evidence. It will be useful to first examine mobility rates within a broad swathof 24 middle-income and high-income
countries. This is an important exercise;
however, insofar as one wishes to draw
conclusions that are relevant to the U.S.
context, it is arguably even more instructive to focus the comparison on countries
that share key features with the U.S. Thebalance of this article thus compares the
U.S. to the United Kingdom, Canada,
and Australia.
The Big Picture
The starting point, then, for our comparative analysis of mobility is a “big-picture”

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

examination of how the U.S. fares compared to other middle-income andhigh-income countries. The data usedhere are drawn from a survey of a growing economics literature measuring theassociation between the adult earningsof children and the incomes and earningsof their parents. Accurately measuring
the degree of intergenerational earnings
mobility requires a good deal of attention to a number of measurement issues
and analytical decisions that researchers make. When these are accounted
for, a consistent cross-national picture
emerges.
Figure 1 demonstrates substantial variation in the degree of intergenerational
earnings mobility across 24 countries,
as measured by the percentage change
in child earnings for each percentagechange in parent earnings. The strengthof the tie between parent and childearnings, when the child’s earnings aremeasured in adulthood, varies more than
threefold between the most and least
fluid countries. At one extreme, a father
who makes twice as much as another(i.e., 100% more) can expect his son toearn 50 to 60 percent more in adulthood,a very high level of intergenerational rigidity found in countries like Peru, South
Africa, China, and Brazil. At the otherextreme, the earnings disparity between
such children shrinks to less than 20 percent in countries like Denmark, Norway,
Finland, and Canada.
The U.S. sits at the upper end of this list,
among a band of countries with rela-

52

economic mobility

tively low intergenerational mobility, where 40 to 50 percent
of income inequality is passed on across the generations. As
many have pointed out, the American Dream is evidently more
likely to be found on the other side of the Atlantic, indeed
most notably in Denmark.1
What accounts for this substantial cross-national variability? Alan Kreuger, the former chief economic advisor to the
Obama administration, is one among many to point out thatintergenerational mobility measured in this way is also related
to cross-national differences in income inequality.2 That is,
high-inequality countries tend to be countries with low mobility, a relationship that led Krueger to suppose that, as income

FIGURE 1. Countries Ranked by the Strength of the Tie Between Father

and Son Earnings

There is nothing more likely to turn a politician’s head than toshow that his or her country is losing a race, stuck near thebottom of a league of nations. But does the U.S. really haveanything to learn from these cross-national comparisons?
There are some inherent limitations to this ranking in Figure
1 that might lead policy makers to quite reasonably dismiss
its relevance. After all, a study of social mobility requires us
to observe the adult outcomes of children and then to relatethem to their childhood experiences. This obviously takes
time, and reliable indicators are only produced after a longlag. We might wonder about the contemporary relevance ofstatistics that refer to the life experiences of people born fourand even five decades ago.
Moreover, even if the comparisons in Figure 1 were still relevant today, it is difficult to draw any clear policy prescriptions
from them. How, for example, might we attempt to draw lessons for the U.S. from Denmark, where the mobility rate is thehighest? As wonderful as Denmark might be, it is not clear thatit has much in common with the U.S. Because the geography,
demographics, labor market institutions, and political processin Denmark are so dramatically different from what prevails in
the U.S., the intersecting set of possible policy options that
the U.S. might usefully borrow are probably pretty slim. The
configuration of forces that have lined up to promote a highdegree of social mobility in Denmark may not be possible policy choices for American decision makers.

Countries ranked by the strength of the tie
between father and son earnings
Peru
South Africa
China
BrazilChile
Italy
United Kingdom
Argentina
United States
Switzerland
Pakistan
Singapore
FranceFor these reasons it might make sense to couple the information in Figure 1 with more judicious comparisons of younger
children in more similar countries. In what follows, I draw froma study co-authored with Bruce Bradbury, Jane Waldfogel,and Elizabeth Washbrook to offer a comparison of four- andfive-year-olds during the mid- to late-1990s who are comingof age in more recent times, and who will be the focus of thenext wave of intergenerational income mobility studies when
they reach adulthood in a decade or more from now.3

Spain
GermanyJapan
New ZealandSwedenAustralia
South Korea
CanadaFinland
NorwayDenmark0

inequality is increasing in the U.S., so too mobility may bedeclining.

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

Intergernational Earnings Elasticity

Note: The horizontal distance displays the intergenerational earnings elasticity between fathers
and sons (i.e., the percentage difference between the adult earnings of a son for a onepercentage point difference in the father’s earnings). The higher the value, the tighter the link
between parent and child earnings, and the lower the degree of intergenerational mobility.
Source: Based upon an updated literature survey originally summarized in Corak, Miles. 2013.
“Inequality from Generation to Generation: The United States in Comparison.” In Robert Rycroft(editor), The Economics of Inequality, Poverty, and Discrimination in the 21st Century, ABCCLIO. Detailed citations are available at http://milescorak.com/2012/01/12/here-is-the-sourcefor-the-great-gatsby-curve-in-the-alan-krueger-speech-at-the-center-for-american-progress/.

This research focuses our attention on just four of the 24
countries listed in Figure 1: Australia, Canada, the United
Kingdom, and the U.S. Arguably these four countries havemore in common with each other than with any others. They
have, in a very general sense, shared historical experiences,similar demographic diversity, and a demonstrated capacity
for much policy learning and spillovers in a variety of domains.
They are especially useful for our purposes because the U.S.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

economic mobility 53
and the United Kingdom are high-inequality and low-mobility
countries, while Australia and Canada are more equal andmore mobile.
The key question that may then be asked: What resources
are available to young children in these countries, and how
are these resources skewed by household income and otherfundamental inequalities that influence opportunities andchances for success? This question is taken on in the section below.

In thinking through why some children flourish and others do
not, it follows that we should care about not just the purely
economic implications of inequality, but also about the social
ones.

More than Money MattersChildren need many things from their parents. Most broadly
put, they need the material resources coming from moneyand financial well-being, and they also need emotional security and an enriching environment, which in the early years
means spending time with loving caregivers like their parents.

But how can these social dimensions be measured? While
there are many good proxies, a good place to start is withthe education of the parents. It is helpful to group children
in these four countries into three categories according to thehighest level of schooling of the parent with the most schooling. In Figures 2 through 8, “high” means that at least one ofthe parents has a college degree; “low” means that neither
has more than a high school diploma; and “medium” meansthat at least one has some education beyond high school
graduation, but not a completed college degree. These threebroad levels offer a good proxy for the underlying, or “permanent,” income prospects of the family; they can be measured

FIGURE 2. Median Family Income of Children in a Family of Four

FIGURE 3. Percentage of Children Read to Everyday by Their Parents

Percentage of children
read to everyday by their parents

100

100

80

80

60

60
CanadaPercent

Dollars (in thousands)

Median family incomeof children in a family of four ($2011)40

Australia
CanadaUnited Kingdom

40Australia
United States

United Kingdom
United States

20

20

0

0
High

MediumLow

High

MediumLow

Parental Education

Parental Education

Note: The median equivalized total household income for a family of four is graphed here. Dollar
amounts are expressed in 2011 constant dollars using national price indices, and the OECD
Purchasing Price Parity index for “actual individual consumption” for the same year. Equivalenthousehold income was derived using the square root of household size. The dollar amounts
displayed are based upon an average of income at three points in the child’s life cycle: at ages
5, 7, and 11. Income refers to total household income including imputed values for income
support programs, like TANF, SNAP, and the EITC in the United States.

Note: The proportion of four- and five-year-old children read to on a daily basis is graphed here.
Question wording differs slightly across countries: The question refers to any family member in
the U.S. and Australia, to just the parent answering the survey question in the United Kingdom,
and to the parent or any other adult in Canada.
Source: Drawn by the author, based upon information in Bradbury et al. 2015. TechnicalAppendix Table A3.8, available at https://www.russellsage.org/sites/all/files/Technical%20
Appendix%20to%20Bradbury%20et%20al%202015.pdf.

Source: Drawn by the author, based upon information in Bradbury, Bruce, Miles Corak,Jane Waldfogel, and Elizabeth Washbrook. 2015. Too Many Children Left Behind: The U.S.
Achievement Gap in Comparative Perspective, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. TechnicalAppendix Table A3.2, available at https://www.russellsage.org/sites/all/files/Technical%20
Appendix%20to%20Bradbury%20et%20al%202015.pdf. Full details on the methodology used,
including the conversion of categorical variables to continuous, and imputations for governmenttransfers are given on pages 21 through 27 of this appendix.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

54

economic mobility

across these four countries in reasonably comparable ways;
and they signal important independent influences determininga child’s development.
Figures 2 through 4 collectively make an important point. In
all four countries, they show that more education does notjust mean more money, but it also means more non-monetary
resources. They also show that this socioeconomic gradientis steepest in the U.S. If these socioeconomic correlates ofmoney matter, then there is good reason to worry that obstacles to mobility may be especially prominent in the U.S. Thisline of argumentation is laid out in more detail below.
We begin by considering cross-group differences in accessto money. The monetary differences across these three socialgroups are very sharp in the U.S., where the median incomeof a family of four ranges from $98,100 for the high-educationgroup to $31,800 for the low-education group. The betweengroup contrast is also substantial in the United Kingdom, with

FIGURE 4.

Percentage of Children Whose Mother is in Poor Health

Percentage of children
whose mother is in poor health25

United Kingdom

20

United States

the median income of households with low education actuallyjust a bit lower than in the U.S. But in Australia and Canada,
the gradient is not as steep; the household incomes of children in the low-education group are 12 percent to almost 20
percent higher than in the U.S.
These differences reflect the fact that there is more inequality in American labor markets, more income poverty, andless generosity in government income support. Figure 2 suggests that these labor market and income transfer policies
are shadowed in the financial resources available to children.
It is more difficult to quantify the between-group differencesin non-monetary resources and the quality of time parents
spend with their children. An often-used indicator of the quality of family time is the degree to which preschool children
are exposed to books and other cultural resources that foster
readiness to learn.
Canada seems to stand out in this regard. Figure 3 showsthat the fraction of Canadian four- and five-year-olds who areread to on a daily basis by a parent or other adult is muchhigher than elsewhere. About 55 percent of Canadian children
whose parents have no more than a high school diploma areread to on a daily basis. This is not much different from the
proportion of American children whose parents have at least
a college degree. At the same time, it should be noted thatthe extent of the inequalities across the three socioeconomic
groups is roughly similar across the four countries and that
there are slight differences in the way the associated survey
questions are worded that may skew the comparisons.

Percent

15
Australia

10

5

0

CanadaHigh

MediumLow

Parental Education
Note: The self-reported health status of mothers with four- and five-year-old children is graphed
here. The proportions refer to the percentage of children whose mothers report being in fair orpoor health, as indicated by the two lowest categories on a 5-point scale.
Source: Drawn by the author, based upon information in Bradbury et al. 2015. TechnicalAppendix Table A3.7, available at https://www.russellsage.org/sites/all/files/Technical%20
Appendix%20to%20Bradbury%20et%20al%202015.pdf

But this is only one aspect of family socioeconomic differences and parenting style. Another marker might be found in
the mental and physical health of parents. Children living in
low-educated households in the U.S. and the United Kingdom are much more likely to have mothers who report being
in only fair or poor health. This proportion is much lower inAustralia, and noticeably lower in Canada, where there hardly
appears to be any gradient across the three socioeconomic
groups.
These inequalities in monetary and non-monetary resources
should lead us to worry about (1) the capacity of low-education parents to balance work and family time in pursuit of
the money their families need, and (2) the extent to which
the early years are adequately enriching for children with loweducation parents.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

economic mobility 55
Time Slips Away from the Family
In Figure 5, we turn to the work-family balance. We see thatthe work patterns of mothers in the U.S. are distinctive. The
main reason: Work takes priority in the U.S. Overall, American mothers are more likely to be working, and more likely
to be working full-time (defined as usually spending morethan 30 hours per week at work). About one-half of five-yearold children with highly educated parents in the U.S. live ina household where the mother works full-time. While this issimilar in Canada, it is much lower in Australia and the United
Kingdom.
The workplace is more likely to “win out” against the familyin American households with low education. Figure 5 showsthat 53 percent of children in low-education households
have a mother who works full-time, compared to 49 percent
among children in high-education households. Low-educated mothers are actually more likely to be working full-timethan high-educated mothers.

time by purchasing high-quality childcare and other enrichment activities. Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane haveshown that such compensatory purchases are much morecommon among families at the top of the American income
distribution than among those at the bottom.4
What is also untold is that the flexibility to manage family
and market responsibilities also seems more limited in the
U.S., where working part-time is significantly less common
than it is in the other three countries. Bruce Bradbury and his
co-authors document that, overall, 15 percent of American
five-year-olds have a working mother who works part-time(i.e., puts in no more than 29 hours per week), whereas overa third of mothers in Australia and the United Kingdom work
part-time, and one-quarter in Canada work part-time. The
capacity to balance work and family in this way is much lower
in low-educated American households (i.e., 10%) than in thehigh-educated households (i.e., 22%).

These comparisons do not take into account the extent towhich money can be used to compensate for lost parental

Families in Flux
At the same time, the American family is less stable than families elsewhere, with the result that it is sometimes less primed

FIGURE 5. Percentage of Children Whose Mother Works Full Time

FIGURE 6. Percentage of Children Born to a Teen Mother

Percentage of children
whose mother works full time

Percentage of children
born to a teen mother

75

25

60

20

United States

United States

45
Percent

Percent

15

30

CanadaUnited Kingdom

10CanadaAustralia

155Australia

United Kingdom

0

0
High

MediumHigh

Low

MediumLow

Parental Education

Parental Education

Note: The proportion of five-year-old children whose mothers usually work more than 30 hours
per week is graphed here.

Note: The proportion of four- and five-year-old children whose mother was 19 years or younger
at the time of the child’s birth is graphed here.

Source: Drawn by the author, based upon information in Bradbury et al. 2015. TechnicalAppendix Table A4.10, available at https://www.russellsage.org/sites/all/files/Technical%20
Appendix%20to%20Bradbury%20et%20al%202015.pdf.

Source: Drawn by the author based upon information in Bradbury et al. 2015. TechnicalAppendix Table A3.6, available at https://www.russellsage.org/sites/all/files/Technical%20
Appendix%20to%20Bradbury%20et%20al%202015.pdf

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

economic mobility

to offer children an environment that is as enriching. More is
being asked of families who are more vulnerable.
The most notable and clearest difference is reflected in thepercentage of children born to a teen mother. Over one ineight (12%) of American four- and five-year-olds were bornto a mother who was 19 or younger at the time of their birth.
This is twice the proportion in the United Kingdom and is fourtimes as high as that in Australia and Canada.
But Figure 6 also shows that the associated socioeconomic
gradient is strikingly sharp in the U.S., rising from 3 percent
of children in high-educated households to 12 percent inmedium-educated households and all the way to 22 percent
for those in low-educated households. More than one in fivechildren in households with low levels of education were bornto a teen mother.
This is the first step in what the sociologist Andrew Cherlin
has called the “marriage-go-round,” his metaphor for the very
high dynamics in American family life.5 The upshot is that, by
the ages of four and five, children are much less likely to be

FIGURE 7. Percentage of Children Living with Both Biological Parents

living with both biological parents in the U.S. While over 80
percent of American children in high-educated households
live with both biological parents, this is noticeably lower thanin the other countries, where 93 to 94 percent do so. Only
about one-half of American children in low-educated households are still living with both biological parents at aroundages four to five, significantly below the proportions elsewhere (Figure 7).
The American case is also distinctive because immigration isstrongly tied to various types of socioeconomic disadvantage.
The point here is not that the U.S. is a distinctively immigrantsociety. To the contrary, all four of our comparator countries
stand out as being immigrant-receiving nations, although thisis particularly so for Australia and Canada. Overall, one in five
American children live in a household with at least one parent being an immigrant, which is higher than the 15 percent
in the United Kingdom, but much lower than the 35 percent
in Australia.
What is notable, however, is that American immigrant children
are much more likely to be in households with low educa-

FIGURE 8. Percentage of Children Living with Immigrant Parents

Percentage of children
living with immigrant parents

Percentage of children
living with both biological parents

50

90

40

80

30

Percent

100

Australia

Australia

Percent

56

United States

20

70

CanadaUnited Kingdom

Canada60

United Kingdom

United States

50
High

Medium

10

0
High

Low

MediumLow

Parental Education

Parental Education

Note: The graph refers to the proportion of four- and five-year-old children living in a householdwith two parents, both of whom are reported as being the biological parents.

Note: The proportion of four- and five-year-old children with a mother or a father born outside of
the country is graphed here.

Source: Drawn by the author, based upon information in Bradbury et al. 2015. TechnicalAppendix Table A3.6, available at https://www.russellsage.org/sites/all/files/Technical%20
Appendix%20to%20Bradbury%20et%20al%202015.pdf

Source: Drawn by the author based upon information in Bradbury et al. 2015. TechnicalAppendix Table A3.6, available at https://www.russellsage.org/sites/all/files/Technical%20
Appendix%20to%20Bradbury%20et%20al%202015.pdf .

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

economic mobility 57
tion. The tilt is just the opposite in Australia and Canada: anastounding 43 percent of Australian children in high-education households have at least one immigrant parent, andfully a third of Canadian children do. In the U.S., a child in an
immigrant household is more likely to be in a low-education
household.
These low-education households may of course come withstrong families. But we might still worry about their capacity
to reach and connect with the broader American community
and access the full complement of resources—from healthcare, to schools, to income support—of benefit to their children. We might also worry about the help or hindrance of
public policies. Because immigrant families in Australia andCanada have more education and presumably stronger language skills and more advantaged social networks, theymight be better able to connect to the wider community.
Prospects for the Next Generation
The resources children need to become successful andengaged adults come—first and foremost—from their families. But families don’t exist in isolation. In providing for theirchildren, parents interact and rely upon the communities towhich they belong and the public programs that afford extra
security, income, and investment. And most obviously, parents interact with the market, and the labor market institutions
that determine access to jobs and living wages.
Family, state, and market all determine the resources available to children. It should be no surprise that economic

mobility differs across countries, but also that it differs for different reasons. Some of these cross-national differences may
be policy-relevant, and some may not.
They are most likely to be relevant in the four countries we’vehighlighted. The rankings of resources available to four- andfive-year-olds in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, andthe U.S. during the mid- to late-1990s echo the rankings ofthe economic outcomes of 40-year-olds born in the 1960s.
These comparisons should make us wonder about the prospects for the next generation.
The U.S. continues to stand at the uncomfortable end of thesemore relevant comparisons. We conclude with three messages that are intended as provocations and that thus require
more detailed discussion: (1) Stable and secure families arecentral to child development and equality of opportunity andshould be promoted in a number of different ways; (2) the
work-family balance has to move toward making the workplace more convenient for families, not the other way around;and (3) the playing field has to open up to the relatively disadvantaged early on because it’s likely a lot harder to foster
capabilities and develop opportunities afterward. ■Miles Corak is a professor of economics with the Graduate
School of Public and International Affairs at the University ofOttawa, Ottawa, Canada, and a visiting professor of economics
at Harvard University during the 2015–2016 academic year.
You can follow him on Twitter at @MilesCorak or on his blog at
MilesCorak.com.

NOTES
1. DeParle, Jason. 2012. “Harder for Americans
to Rise from Lower Rungs.” The New YorkTimes, January 4. Available at http://www.
nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-foramericans-to-rise-from-lower-rungs.html?_r=0.
2. Krueger, Alan B. 2012. “The Rise andConsequences of Inequality in the UnitedStates.” Speech by the Chairman, Council of
Economic Advisors to the Center for American Progress, January 12. See also Krueger,
Alan B. 2015. “The Great Utility of the Great
Gatsby Curve,” Social Mobility Memos, The
Brookings Institution, available at http://www.
brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/
posts/2015/05/19-utility-great-gatsby-curvekrueger; and Corak, Miles. 2013. “Income
Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Inter-

generational Mobility.” Journal of Economic
Perspectives, 27(3), 79–102, available at https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/
jep.27.3.79.
3. The information used for the comparison of
the U.S. to Australia, Canada, and the United
Kingdom draws from Bradbury, Bruce, Miles
Corak, Jane Waldfogel, and Elizabeth Washbrook. 2015. Too Many Children Left Behind:
The U.S. Achievement Gap in Comparative
Perspective, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Please consult the technical appendix
available at https://www.russellsage.org/sites/
all/files/Technical%20Appendix%20to%20
Bradbury%20et%20al%202015.pdf . I am
solely responsible for the figures, interpretations
given, and any errors they may contain.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

4. Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane document the evolution of what they refer to as“enrichment expenditures” in the U.S. in Figure
1.6, page 11 of Duncan, Greg J., and Richard
J. Murnane. 2011. “Introduction: The American
Dream, Then and Now.” In Greg J. Duncan andRichard J. Murnane (editors). Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’sLife Chances. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
5. Cherlin, Andrew J. 2009. The Marriage-GoRound: The State of Marriage and the Family in
America Today. New York: Vintage.

S TAT E O F T H E U N I O N

healthThe Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality

BY JASON BECKFIELD AND KATHERINE MORRISKEY FINDINGS• The U.S. population is notjust sicker, on average, thanthe European population,
but also has a higher levelof health inequality than theEuropean population (whendata from the U.S. Current
Population Survey and theEuropean Union Survey ofIncome and Living Conditions
are compared).
• The U.S. states that combine
low self-rated health withhigh health inequality(Mississippi, Kentucky,
Louisiana, North Carolina,
Ohio, Tennessee, and South
Carolina) look strikingly
similar—in terms of theirhealth profiles—to Central
and Eastern European
countries (Bulgaria, theCzech Republic, Estonia,
Latvia, and Slovenia).
• At the other extreme are U.S.
states that combine highself-rated health with low
health inequality (Nevada,
Idaho, Utah, Washington,
and Wyoming). These states,
although “high-performing”
in the U.S. context, arenonetheless less healthy
and less equal than thecorresponding “highperforming” countries in theEuropean context (Austria,
Denmark, France, and Spain).

People living in the United States today
can expect to live shorter and sicker lives,compared to people living in any other richdemocracy.1 This “health gap” between
the U.S. and its peer countries is growing
over time, as Canadian, British, Australian,
French, German, and Swedish death rates
among people aged 45–54 continue falling,
and the U.S. fails to keep pace with suchchanges.2
But such comparisons—telling as they are—rely on the combination of mortality rates
across entire populations, without regard
for inequality within these societies. It is
impossible to tell from these averages how
much inequality there is between rich Americans and poor Americans, and between therich British and poor British. Cross-national
comparisons of life expectancy also dependon the assumption that people born into
each society this year will experience thesame mortality rates as people who wereborn over the past hundred years.
These two limitations of cross-national
comparisons of aggregated-average population health matter because inequalities
and averages can fit together in different
ways. It could be the case, for example, that
the American average is pulled down by alarge number of unhealthy people who aresicker than unhealthy people in the United
Kingdom, even as healthier people in the
U.S. are as healthy as healthy people in the
United Kingdom. It could also be the casethat the current health of the U.S. population is underestimated in the calculation oflife expectancy, if Americans living in thenext hundred years will be healthier than
Americans who have lived and died over the
past hundred years.
In this report, we evaluate the state of theunion by comparing health inequality among
Americans to health inequality amongpeople living in 27 European countries.
Our evaluation extends the cross-national
comparisons of aggregated-average life
expectancies and mortality rates by comparing the health of richer people to thehealth of poorer people within each country. That is, our focus is on the distributionof population health, or health inequality.
We then look across countries to evaluate whether and how the gap between thehealth of the rich and the health of the poor
varies. We aim to answer the following two
simple questions: If a person with a lower
income could choose to live in the U.S. orin a different rich democracy, where should
she choose to live? And, likewise, if a person with a higher income could choose tolive in the U.S. or in a different rich democracy, where should she choose to live?
Health Inequality in the U.S.
The 2015 “State of the States” issue ofPathways included an excellent article bySarah Burgard and Molly King, who used2013 data from the U.S. Center for Disease
Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk
Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to estimate health inequality in each of the 50 U.S.
states (plus the District of Columbia).3 We
replicate their analysis using the 2008–2010
Integrated Public Use Microdata Series–
Current Population Survey (IPUMS-CPS), to

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

health 59
set a baseline for our cross-national comparisons.4
We measure health with a questionnaire item that asked
respondents to rate their own health: “Would you say thatin general your health is excellent, very good, good, fair, or
poor?” Consistent with earlier work using the same item, we
combine “fair” and “poor” responses into one category (which
we will dub as “poor health”), and we combine the remaining
responses into another category (which we will dub as “goodhealth”). We label those living in a household with an income
at or below the 20th percentile for their state as “low income,”
and we label those living in a household with an income at or
above the 80th percentile for their state as “high income.” Wethen calculate a simple estimate of relative health inequality
using relative risk ratios: the prevalence of poor health among
low-income persons divided by the prevalence of poor healthamong high-income persons.
To paint a complete picture of health inequality, we must consider not just the inequality in the distribution of poor healthacross people that are grouped by income, but also the prevalence of poor health. To see why, imagine two societies: onethat is on-average sicker, and another that is on-average healthier. Suppose that, in each society, low-income households aretwice as likely as high-income households to report health thatis poor. In the healthier society, the difference between thehealth of the high-income households and the health of the
low-income households will be smaller in absolute terms, eventhough their relative inequality is exactly the same.
Following Burgard and King, we combine this information about
relative health inequalities and the prevalence of sickness intoa figure that shows four groups of states: unequal unhealthy
states (UU), unequal healthy states (UH), equal healthy states(EH), and equal unhealthy states (EU).
Figure 1 shows clear regional differences in the states. There
are 15 states in the UU group, and the most unhealthy,
unequal states are the Southern states of Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. These states
have an above-median prevalence of poor health (thus thedesignation “unhealthy”), and an above-median level of relative health inequality between people in households with anannual income in the bottom quintile for their state and thosein households with an annual income in the top quintile for theirstate. These are the states where it is the worst to be poor.
Consider, for example, Mississippi: Here, the prevalence ofpoor health is 0.23 (and the prevalence of good health is 0.77).
The relative risk ratio comparing low-income to high-income

people is 5.57, meaning that low-income Mississippians areover five times more likely to report poor health than are highincome Mississippians.
In the opposite quadrant of the figure, we find those statesthat are both relatively equal and healthier. Idaho stands out
for having both a low prevalence of poor health, at 11 percent of Idahoans, as well as a low level of inequality. Indeed,
Idaho has the lowest relative risk ratio in the U.S., at 3.03.
Hawaii also has a relative risk ratio of 3.03, but has a comparatively higher prevalence of poor health, indeed it is above
the national median for these data.
The next lowest level of relative inequality in the group of
healthy states is found in Nevada (with a relative risk ratioof 3.41), followed by Nebraska, Utah, and South Dakota.
Indeed, what is striking about the figure is that there are few
U.S. states (only 12, including Idaho) in the equal-healthygroup. And three of those states (Alaska, Minnesota, andWashington) are barely on the more-equal side of the red line.
The upshot, as we’ll see, is that most of the healthy states arealso unequal, and most of the equal states are also unhealthy.
A stark exception to this pattern is Massachusetts, which has
a low prevalence of poor health (0.11) and by far the highest
amount of inequality (with a relative risk ratio of 15.61). This
staggering health inequity persists today and has been recognized by the Massachusetts Department of Public Healthas a pressing policy concern.5 Its European analogue is thesmall, Mediterranean country of Cyprus. While tiny Cyprus(population 1.1 million) is only about one-sixth the size of
Massachusetts (population 6.7 million), larger Netherlands(population 16.8 million) also combines a very high level ofhealth inequality with a healthy population average (Figure 2).
If we average these inequality calculations across states,
and weight by the population in each state (so that big states
like California, New York, and Texas contribute more information), we find that the relative risk ratio for the U.S. as awhole is about 5. We also find that, overall, the U.S. prevalence of reporting poor health is 13.6 percent. These twostatistics establish the U.S. as an outlier with respect to both
health inequality and overall healthiness. As we will discuss ingreater detail below, the U.S. level of inequality is far higher
than we observe in most European countries, and the prevalence of poor health is on par with the former Soviet-blocstates of Central and Eastern Europe. As we can see in Figure
2, in Europe, the overall relative risk ratio (weighted by the
populations of the 27 societies for which we have data) is also
about 5, and the overall prevalence of poor health is 9 percent.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

60

healthHowever, the difference in health inequality between the U.S.
and Europe becomes abundantly clear when we account for
population differences in age, gender, marital status, education, and unemployment. To do so, we calculate the incident
risk ratio for each state or country separately using modified
Poisson regression models with robust error variances.6,7 As
we show below in Figures 5a and 5b, the incident rate ratioof poor health for low-income Americans across all 50 states
and the District of Columbia is 2.3, while the incident rate ratioof poor health for low-income Europeans across all 27 countries included in the analysis is 1.6. It follows that Europeansare, on average, not just healthier than Americans, but arealso more equal when accounting for population differencesin key demographic and social characteristics.
Health Inequality in Europe
We now turn to a more thorough comparison of U.S. andEuropean health and health inequality. To place healthinequalities in the U.S. in comparative context, we use
data from the European Union Survey of Income and Living

We must note that our analysis of the EU-SILC data differsfrom our analysis of the IPUMS-CPS data in an important
respect. The wording of responses to the self-rated healthitem differs: in the EU-SILC data, the responses are “verybad,” “bad,” “good,” “very good,” and “excellent.” We collapse the bottom two and top three categories, again drawing
the line at good-or-better health versus less-than-good health.
The EU-SILC categorization differs, then, from the IPUMSCPS categorization by virtue of replacing the label “fair” withthat of “bad” and the label “poor” with that of “very bad.” If
these inconsistencies in labeling have any effect, a reasonable hypothesis is that they would create the appearance ofbetter health in Europe (given that those with objectively middling health might be more inclined to label it as “fair” in the
IPUMS-CPS than “bad” in the EU-SILC).

.25

Relative Health Inequality by Prevalence of Self-Rated Poor Health in U.S. States and the District of Columbia, 2008–2010

EU
WV

AR
SC

.2

UU

MS

OK MO
NM

AL
KY

.15

TN

LA

NC
TX ME
FL
PA
OR MT
HI
CA
AZ
NY
WA
AK
NV
WYILNJVT GADCSD MD DEID
IAND CO
KS
NE
MN
UT

.1
.05

Prevalence of Self-Rated Poor Health

FIGURE 1.

Conditions (EU-SILC), which is currently the best sourceof population-representative, cross-nationally comparable,
and individual-level information about health in European
societies.

OH
RI IN

MI

VA
WI

CT

MA

NH

UH

EH
0

5

10

15

Relative Risk Ratio
Northeast

Midwest

South

West

Note: Relative risk ratios are calculated as the prevalence of poor health among low-income persons (those with a household income in the bottom quintile for that state) divided by the prevalence ofpoor health among high-income persons (those with a household income in the top quintile for that state). All estimates are unweighted. Data are from the 2008-2010 IPUMS-CPS. N = 441,843. Poor
health is defined as self-rated “fair” or “poor” health. Red lines represent the median values across all states. EU: Equal-Unhealthy; UU: Unequal-Unhealthy; EH: Equal-Healthy; UH: Unequal-Healthy.
Regional divisions reflect Census Bureau categories. States are marked by their two-letter postal abbreviations: Alabama (AL); Alaska (AK); Arizona (AZ); Arkansas (AR); California (CA); Colorado (CO);Connecticut (CT); Delaware (DE); District of Columbia (DC); Florida (FL); Georgia (GA); Hawaii (HI); Idaho (ID); Illinois (IL); Indiana (IN); Iowa (IA); Kansas (KS); Kentucky (KY); Louisiana (LA); Maine(ME); Maryland (MD); Massachusetts (MA); Michigan (MI); Minnesota (MN); Mississippi (MS); Missouri (MO); Montana (MT); Nebraska (NE); Nevada (NV); New Hampshire (NH); New Jersey (NJ);
New Mexico (NM); New York (NY); North Carolina (NC); North Dakota (ND); Ohio (OH); Oklahoma (OK); Oregon (OR); Pennsylvania (PA); Rhode Island (RI); South Carolina (SC); South Dakota (SD);
Tennessee (TN); Texas (TX); Utah (UT); Vermont (VT); Virginia (VA); Washington (WA); West Virginia (WV); Wisconsin (WI); Wyoming (WY).

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

health 61
It is also instructive to compare the places falling into theunequal-unhealthy quadrant. The countries of Bulgaria, theCzech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, and Slovenia represent theclearest European cases of unequal-unhealthy societies interms of simple relative inequality, while the U.S. analogues are
Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee.

To facilitate U.S.-Europe comparisons, we show our EU-SILC
results in graphs that are formatted in the same way as thegraphs of IPUMS-CPS results. The first striking U.S.-Europe
difference is the lower prevalence of “poor health” in all European societies. While in the U.S. this prevalence varies from alow of 0.09 in New Hampshire to a high of 0.23 in Mississippi,
in Europe it ranges from a low of 0.04 in the Netherlands to ahigh of 0.21 in Lithuania. The simple, if unsurprising, conclusion: Good health is more prevalent in Europe than in the U.S.
And this greater prevalence of good health in Europe would
probably be even more pronounced if the large incarcerated
population in the U.S. had been included in the calculations.8

It would probably come as a surprise to Americans living inthese states that they share a population health profile withpeople living in former Soviet-bloc societies. This result raises
the question of what sort of ruptures in the social fabric thesestates might share with societies that so recently experienced
the transition from socialism to capitalism.

Setting aside this overarching difference, there are also somesimilarities. In Europe, as in the U.S., equal-healthy places (thelower-left quadrant of Figure 2) are scarce. France and Spain
are the only large countries in this quadrant. This equal-healthygroup also includes Austria, Denmark, Iceland, Luxembourg,and Norway.

UU

EU
LT

.2

.25

Relative Health Inequality by Prevalence of Self-Rated Poor Health in 27 European Countries, 2008–2010

LV

HU
PL

.15

PT

.1

RO
FR
ES

EH
0

IT
AT

EE

BG SI
CZ

SK

.05

Prevalence of Self-Rated Poor Health

FIGURE 2.

Because the EU-SILC and the IPUMS-CPS use different
response categories for the self-rated health question, we
re-estimated the relative risk ratios for the other health items
that are available in the EU-SILC. The first alternative measure
is a binary indicator for having a chronic condition, defined asa “long-standing illness, disability, or infirmity.” The second

EL
LU

FI
DK

CY

BE
NO
IS SE

MT

UK

UH

NL

5

10

15

Relative Risk Ratio
Eastern

Northern

Southern

Western

Note: Relative risk ratios are calculated as the prevalence of poor health among low-income persons (those with a household income in the bottom quintile for that country) divided by the prevalence ofpoor health among high-income persons (those with a household income in the top quintile for that country). All estimates are unweighted. Data are from the 2010 EU-SILC. N = 533,933. Poor health isdefined as self-rated “bad” or “very bad” health. Red lines represent the median values across all countries. EU: Equal-Unhealthy; UU: Unequal-Unhealthy; EH: Equal-Healthy; UU: Unequal-Unhealthy.
Regional divisions reflect United Nations categories. Eastern European countries are Bulgaria (BG), Czech Republic (CZ), Hungary (HU), Poland (PL), Romania (RO), and Slovakia (SK). Northern
European countries are Denmark (DK), Estonia (EE), Finland (FI), Iceland (IS), Latvia (LV), Lithuania (LT), Norway (NO), Sweden (SE), and the United Kingdom (UK). Southern European countries are
Cyprus (CY), Greece (EL), Italy (IT), Malta (MT), Portugal (PT), Slovenia (SL), Spain (ES), Austria (AT), Belgium (BE), France (FR), Luxembourg (LU), and the Netherlands (NL).

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

62

healthalternative measure is a binary indicator for having a physicallimitation, defined as reporting any difficulty performing“activities people usually do” due to “an ongoing healthproblem.”
The results from these additional analyses are shown in
Figures 3 and 4. Overall, there is much less health inequality
according to these measures. In both cases, Europeans inhouseholds with annual incomes in the bottom quintile are
between two and three times as likely to report problems
as Europeans in households with annual income in the top
quintile.
The relative equality of European health may of course be afunction of universal healthcare in Europe. When healthcare
is universally provided, treatment for various conditions andlimitations should not be as income-dependent as it is in the
U.S. It is also striking that, despite the relatively high prevalence of chronic conditions and activity limitations (30% and25%, respectively), the prevalence of self-rated “poor health”
is so much lower than it is in the U.S. (9% vs. 13.6%).
Choosing Where to LiveAt the outset of this article, we promised to weigh in on where
one might choose to move under the conceit that individuals
relocate on the basis of health considerations alone. If ourhypothetical unhealthy poor person were suddenly geographically mobile, where should she move? Our results suggest
that, if she were confined to the U.S., she would do best in
the western states of Idaho, Nevada, or Utah. But she would
do yet better in the countries of Austria or Spain.

in 27 European Countries, 2008–2010

EE

EU

UU

.35

FIGURE 4. Relative Health Inequality by Prevalence of Activity Limitationsin 27 European Countries, 2008–2010.45

FIGURE 3. Relative Health Inequality by Prevalence of Chronic Conditions

EU

LV

FR
PL
NL PT
AT

SE

SI
NO

CZ

LT

CY

ES
IS

MT

SK
DK
BE
BG

EH

IT

UH

LU

1.5

2

EL

2.5

3

3.5

.15

LV
HU UK

RO

.2

Prevalence of Activity Limitations
.2
.25
.3

Prevalence of Chronic Conditions
.25
.3
.35
.4

FI

Northern

SK
SI

FI

HU

PT
AT
RO NL

DK

LT

FR

PL

ES

IT

CZ
UK
BE
EL

CY

LU
BG
IS

EH
1

SE

NO
MT

2

Relative Risk Ratio
Eastern

UU

EE

3

UH

4

5

Southern

Western

Relative Risk Ratio

Southern

Western

Note: Relative risk ratios are calculated as the prevalence of chronic conditions among low
income persons (those with a household income in the bottom quintile for that country) divided
by the prevalence of chronic conditions among high income persons (those with a householdincome in the top quintile for that country). All estimates are unweighted. Data are from the 2010
EU-SILC. N = 533,933. Chronic conditions are defined as “any long-standing illness, disability
or infirmity.” Red lines represent the median values across all countries. EU: Equal-Unhealthy;
UU: Unequal-Unhealthy; EH: Equal-Healthy; UU: Unequal-Unhealthy. Regional divisions reflect
United Nations categories. Eastern European countries are Bulgaria (BG), Czech Republic (CZ),
Hungary (HU), Poland (PL), Romania (RO), and Slovakia (SK). Northern European countries are
Denmark (DK), Estonia (EE), Finland (FI), Iceland (IS), Latvia (LV), Lithuania (LT), Norway (NO),
Sweden (SE), and the United Kingdom (UK). Southern European countries are Cyprus (CY),
Greece (EL), Italy (IT), Malta (MT), Portugal (PT), Slovenia (SL), Spain (ES), Austria (AT), Belgium(BE), France (FR), Luxembourg (LU), and the Netherlands (NL).

Eastern

Northern

Note: Relative risk ratios are calculated as the prevalence of activity limitations among lowincome persons (those with a household income in the bottom quintile for that country) divided
by the prevalence of activity limitations among high-income persons (those with a householdincome in the top quintile for that country). All estimates are unweighted. Data are from the2010 EU-SILC. N = 533,933. Activity limitations are defined as “any limit to daily activities”
due to illness or disability. Red lines represent the median values across all countries. EU:
Equal-Unhealthy; UU: Unequal-Unhealthy; EH: Equal-Healthy; UU: Unequal-Unhealthy. Regional
divisions reflect United Nations categories. Eastern European countries are Bulgaria (BG),
Czech Republic (CZ), Hungary (HU), Poland (PL), Romania (RO), and Slovakia (SK). Northern
European countries are Denmark (DK), Estonia (EE), Finland (FI), Iceland (IS), Latvia (LV),
Lithuania (LT), Norway (NO), Sweden (SE), and the United Kingdom (UK). Southern European
countries are Cyprus (CY), Greece (EL), Italy (IT), Malta (MT), Portugal (PT), Slovenia (SL), Spain(ES), Austria (AT), Belgium (BE), France (FR), Luxembourg (LU), and the Netherlands (NL).

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

health 63
But what about a high-income person? Where should that
person choose to live? Our results suggest that here too there
are a range of consequential choices, with the best ones
being the Netherlands, Iceland, Malta, or Sweden, certainly adisparate lot. In these places, the prevalence of “poor health”
among people with household income in the top 20 percent
for their country of residence is vanishingly low, below 5
percent. Crucially, our models predict that our hypotheticalmover would not fare as well in any of the U.S. states that are
best for the better-off: Connecticut, New Hampshire, Virginia,
or Wisconsin.
Conclusions
Our analyses of health prevalence and relative health inequality demonstrate that many of the very places with the least
health inequality are also those with the best overall popula-

FIGURE 5A. Rank Ordered Self-Rated Health Inequality in U.S. States
and the District of Columbia, Controlling for Socio-Demographic
Characteristics, 2008–2010

NortheastSouth

MidwestWest

Pennsylvania
New Jersey
Vermont
New York
Maine
New Hampshire
Rhode Island
Connecticut
Massachusettstion health. It follows that our hypothetical low-income person
and high-income person are healthiest in exactly the sameplaces: Austria, France, and Spain. These populations areboth very healthy by international standards and have a very
low level of health inequality by international standards (especially in terms of absolute inequality).
People living in the U.S. are often reluctant to draw lessons
from the European experience, in part because the U.S. is somuch larger and heterogeneous than many European countries. We tackle this problem by disaggregating the U.S. into
its 50 states, plus the District of Columbia. Furthermore, ourregression results in Figure 5 demonstrate the persistence of
these differences when controlling for population differencesin key demographic and social characteristics.

FIGURE 5B. Rank Ordered Self-Rated Health Inequality in 27 European
Countries, Controlling for Socio-Demographic Characteristics,
2008–2010

Romania
Bulgaria

Eastern

Slovakia
Czech RepublicHungary
PolandSouth Carolina
Maryland
Delaware
FloridaDistrict of Columbia
Oklahoma
Mississippi
West Virginia
Georgia
Arkansas
Texas
Louisiana
North Carolina
AlabamaKentucky
Virginia
Tennessee

Lithuania
LatviaFinland
Estonia

Northern

United Kingdom
IcelandDenmark
NorwaySweden

Iowa
Missouri
Illinois
North Dakota
South Dakota
Ohio
Wisconsin
Minnesota
KansasIndiana
Michigan

Spain
Italy
Malta

Southern

Portugal
GreeceIdaho
NevadaHawaii
New Mexico
California
Arizona
Wyoming
OregonNebraska
Montana
Utah
Colorado
AlaskaWashington

Slovenia
CyprusAustria
FranceWestern

Belgium
Luxembourg
Netherlands

0

1

2
3
4
Incident Rate Ratio

5

0

1

2
3
4
Incident Rate Ratio

5

Note: The bar charts above display the relative risk of reporting poor health for low-income persons (household income in the bottom quintile) compared to high-income persons (household income in
the top quintile), controlling for age, gender, marital status, education, and unemployment. The incident rate ratios (IRRs) were estimated using separate modified Poisson regression models with robust
error variances for each state (5a) or country (5b). Red lines reflect the IRR from a full model with all states (5a) or countries (5b).

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

64

healthOur results suggest that, much like income growth andincome equality, population health and health equality can go
together. As is so often the case in the analysis of income
inequality and poverty, social policy choices may be the key
to combining better health and health equality. Perhaps weshould not be surprised that market-fundamentalist states in
the U.S. have levels of average health and health inequalitythat are remarkably similar to the post-Soviet “shock therapy”

countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Indeed, compared
to a peer group of 27 European nations, even the U.S. statesthat are unusually healthy and have unusually low healthinequalities have a long way to go. ■Jason Beckfield is Professor of Sociology, and Katherine Morris isa Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology, at Harvard University.

NOTES
1. Woolf, Steven and Laudon Aron. 2013.
Shorter Lives, Poorer Health: U.S. Health inInternational Perspective. Washington, D.C.:
National Academies Press.
2. Case, Anne and Angus Deaton. 2015. “Risingmorbidity and mortality in midlife among white
non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences.
3. Burgard, Sarah and Molly King. 2015.
“Health.” Pathways Special issue, 49–54.

4. We use data from the 2008–2010 IPUMSCPS rather than the 2013 BRFSS in order tocalculate the 80/20 percentile ratio and to
subsequently harmonize our U.S. analyses
with the 2010 EU-Statistics on Income andLiving Conditions (EU-SILC) Longitudinal File,
Version 4.
5. Massachusetts Department of Public Health,
A Profile of Health Among Massachusetts
Adults, 2011: Results from the Behavioral Risk
Factor Surveillance System, 2013, http://www.
mass.gov/eohhs/docs/dph/behavioral-risk/
report-2011.pdf.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

6. Mackenbach, Johan P. et al. 2008. “Socioeconomic Inequalities in Health in 22 European
Countries.” New England Journal of Medicine,358(23), 2468–2481.
7. Zou, Guangyong. 2004. “A Modified Poisson
Regression Approach to Prospective Studies
with Binary Data.” American Journal of
Epidemiology, 159(7), :702–706.
8. Western, Bruce, and Katherine Beckett.
1999. “How Unregulated Is the U.S. Labor
Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market
Institution.” American Journal of Sociology,
104(4), 1030–1060.

S TAT E O F T H E U N I O N

head 65

residential segregation
The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality

BY DANIEL T. LICHTER,DOMENICO PARISI, HELGA DE VALKKEY FINDINGS• Although there are large
differences in the sizesof minority populations
in Europe and the U.S.,
there nevertheless is rather
remarkable similarity inmacro-segregation acrosscountries in Europe andstates in the U.S.
• The magnitude of minority
segregation in new U.S.
gateway cities is muchgreater than in European
cities experiencing recent
immigrant growth.
• Segregation often overlaps
with many other place-based
inequalities—poverty, unemployment, crime, and housing
quality and overcrowding.
These overlapping disadvantages are seemingly much
more common in the U.S.
than in European countries,
where government efforts
to promote integration (e.g.,social and mixed-income
housing) provide a clear
contrast to the market-driven
solutions preferred in the U.S.
• Policy choices will affectwhether segregation in
ethnic communities orneighborhoods represents away station or platform forfull integration or a chronic or
permanent social condition
that institutionalizes majorityminority social and economic
inequality.

The United States is a nation of
immigrants. More than 1 million
foreign-born U.S. residents each year
become legal permanent residents,
nearly 60 percent of whom eventuallyattain citizenship.1 In stark contrast,
most European countries have had along history of exporting population.
During the 18th and early 19th centuries, the U.S. was a major destination
for European émigrés from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, and elsewhere.
Today, the U.S. remains the world’s leading immigrant-receiving country, but themassive flow from Europe overall has
ended, replaced by new arrivals from
Asia, Latin America, and sub-SaharanAfrica. The historical record in the U.S.
not only highlights the ebb and flow ofimmigration but also reveals the cultural
conflicts and political unrest createdby new ethnic and racial divisions anduneven integration among new immigrant populations.
Indeed, immigration reform, affirmative action, ethnic profiling, and the new
racial re-concentration of urban poverty (e.g., Ferguson, East Baltimore,and North Charleston) continue to bepolitically charged issues, as the 2016
presidential election tells us. Interestingly enough, in some ways Europe
today is not unlike the U.S. a century
ago or more. For much of Europe, therecent influx of immigrants, coupled with
unprecedented labor mobility within theEuropean Union (i.e., the Schengen
Agreement), has raised new questions
about national identity (and allegiance),

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

cultural unity, and assimilation.2 Moreover, the current European refugee
crisis caused by the massive population exodus from war-torn Syria is only
the latest of several previous examples(e.g., Somalia, Kosovo). Some European
countries, facing massive new immigration for the first time, have looked to
the U.S. for answers, hoping to learn
important lessons that might ease thedifficulties associated with growing
diversity and mounting ethnic and religious conflict.3
Here, we start with a straightforward
assumption: The extent to which minority populations (including immigrants)
share the same spatial and social
spaces provides tangible, albeit indirect, evidence of integration or spatial
assimilation. Specifically, we compare
recent patterns of minority group segregation in the U.S. and Europe. At aminimum, declining residential segregation suggests that minority populations
are increasingly able to afford to live inthe same neighborhoods or communities as natives and that they are notlimited by housing market discrimination. Perhaps most importantly, declines
in segregation indicate that majority
and minority populations may increasingly prefer (or are indifferent to) living
together in the same communities orneighborhoods, where they increasingly
share the same cultural values, national
identity, and education. Residential
integration suggests a breakdown ordiminution of majority-minority socialand economic boundaries.

66

residential segregation

Of course, country-to-country differences in data collection and measurement, including differences in ethnic andracial identification and geography, make strict comparisons of minority residential segregation difficult. We focus
our attention on perhaps the most important axes of minority spatial differentiation: ethnoracial background in the U.S.
and immigration (citizenship status and foreign origin areused) in Europe. In doing so, we identify the main group thatis regarded as the “other” in each society and then computesegregation indices relative to the “other-nonother” distinction. Of course, current and past immigration and growing
racial and ethnic diversity are highly interrelated, both inEurope and the U.S. For example, the large majority of American Asians and Hispanics are first- or second-generation
immigrants; most arrived after 1965 with the enactment of the
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (sometimes known
as the Hart-Celler Act). Moreover, racial minorities account for
only about 20 percent of all third-generation Americans (i.e.,
native-born of native-born citizens).4
Our fundamental goal is to document patterns of U.S. ethnoracial segregation across all 50 states, 3,100 counties, andselect metropolitan or big-city populations (i.e., those withrecent influxes of new immigration and that are comparable
to their European counterparts). These estimates are juxtaposed with patterns in Europe, where our analyses focus on
the changing distribution of immigrant patterns in 26 countries(in the European Union), 1,396 county equivalents (so-called
NUTS categories),5 and several illustrative metropolitan
immigrant gateways. We focus on Amsterdam, Rotterdam,
Brussels, and London, but also draw on other recent casestudies of neighborhood segregation in the United Kingdom,France, Germany, Spain, and Italy.
Why Segregation in the U.S. and Europe May Be
Different
Whether new racial and ethnic minority immigrants—both in
the U.S. and Europe—will become fully integrated into majority society is far from clear. On the one hand, Europe’s moregenerous social policy regime (e.g., integrated social housing
and generous welfare programs) may provide a hedge againsthigh rates of residential segregation while even promoting
greater minority integration, unlike the market-driven housing in the U.S. Compared to those in the U.S., immigrant andracial and ethnic minority populations in Europe are typicallymuch smaller in size (absolutely and relative) and less diverse,
and are therefore perhaps less “threatening” to native populations. Europe arguably has fewer major immigrant “gateways,”and each country, unlike the U.S., tends to be dominated by acomparatively small number of distinct national origin groups,

which presumably eases the integration process. Moreover,unlike the case in the U.S., where roughly one-quarter of all
foreign-born residents are unauthorized (and highly segregated in minority communities), the immigrants in Europe are
more often legal residents. More reliable, inexpensive, andextensive citywide systems of public transportation in Europe
have had the effect of dispersing low-income and immigrant
populations more widely throughout the metropolitan region
and beyond.
On the other hand, the recent rise of nationalist political parties
and the right-wing backlash against immigrant populations
in France, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Sweden, among
others, indicate perhaps even greater antipathy toward immigrants than in the U.S. Integrating non-Christian immigrantminorities—especially Muslims from Africa, the Middle East,and Southeast Asia—also sometimes represent a larger political problem and a different set of issues regarding integrationand national identity than the case in the U.S., which has along history of incorporating religious minorities and of extolling religious freedom.
Residential Segregation: Some Empirical Results
Our empirical approach differentiates between macro- andmicro-segregation.6 By macro-segregation, we mean thespatial concentration of minority populations over European
countries and over U.S. states. Macro-segregation also isrevealed empirically by the uneven distribution of minority
populations over counties (or county-equivalent units) in each
European country and each U.S. state. In contrast, microsegregation refers to differences in the spatial distributionof minority and majority population across neighborhoods inspecific cities (i.e., census tracts in U.S. cities and districts
within European cities). Estimates of macro- and micro-segregation are measured by D (i.e., the index of dissimilarly),which indicates the percentage of minorities that would
have to move to another county (or neighborhood) in orderto achieve similar percentages of minorities across all counties (or neighborhoods) in the country (or city). D varies from
0 (i.e., no segregation) to 100 (i.e., complete segregation ofminorities). For additional details about data and measurement, see the Appendix “Measuring Segregation.”
Macro-Segregation: The Big Picture of Minority
Population Concentration
We begin by providing county-level maps of the ethnoracial and immigrant populations in the U.S. (Figure 1) andEurope (Figure 2), respectively. We distinguish counties bywhether the percentage minority is above the U.S. and European averages, below one-half the average, or somewhere

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

residential segregation 67
in between. The mean state percentage of nonwhites across the
U.S. is 23.58, while the mean percentage of immigrants in Europe
is much lower at 5.88. This large
U.S.-Europe difference reflects,
first and foremost, the long historyof minority immigration (including
forced migration from slavery) in
the U.S. In many parts of Europe,massive immigration, especially ofminority (or nonwhite) populations,is a more recent phenomenon.
The data clearly illustrate theconcentration of U.S. minority
populations in the South (a legacyof slavery and indigenous native
populations, including Indians
and Mexicans), along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboard states,
and in major metropolitan areas.
Appalachia and the rural North
Central and Northeast regions in
the U.S. remain overwhelmingly
white. In Europe, large parts ofEastern Europe are overwhelmingly native-born, as is the casein much of Finland. Although Italy,
France, and the United Kingdom
have experienced substantial
recent immigration, the spatial
distribution of immigrants is much
more highly concentrated (e.g.,in the London area in the United
Kingdom, in the north of Italy, andin Paris, Lyon, and Marseille inFrance).

FIGURE 1. Percent Non-White in U.S. Counties, 2010

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Decennial Census.

FIGURE 2.

Percent Non-Citizen in European Counties, Circa 2010

Tables 1 and 2 provide the crosscounty segregation indices (D’s)
for each U.S. state and European
country. The overall D in the U.S.
is 40.2, while it is 38 in all 26 European counties (and 40.8 if limited
to EU countries). These estimatesof segregation vary substantially across states and countries.
In the U.S., segregation varies
from a high of roughly 44 in New
Source: Eurostat.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

68

residential segregation

TABLE 1. County White-Nonwhite Segregation Indices by State, U.S., 2010

All Ethnicities

Black, Asian, & Hispanic

Black

Asian

Hispanic

AlaskaStates

25.3

28.4

34.6

35.8

19.5

Alabama

29.5

30.9

36.4

34.0

22.4

Arkansas

34.0

36.9

56.3

39.9

34.0

Arizona

8.8

9.1

14.3

13.8

9.7

California

20.1

21.0

33.4

29.1

24.9

Colorado

26.0

28.0

47.9

25.0

29.2

Connecticut

17.0

18.1

20.9

12.1

18.1

District of Columbia

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

Delaware

9.9

10.9

12.3

24.8

7.5

Florida

34.6

35.6

32.4

27.3

44.4

Georgia

30.5

31.2

35.7

44.2

32.5

Hawaii

14.7

16.9

31.3

18.6

5.3

Iowa

28.5

30.7

40.4

38.9

33.4
33.5

Idaho

23.1

27.9

29.5

27.3

Illinois

35.5

36.7

43.8

38.1

38.9

Indiana

38.3

40.7

51.3

36.7

37.3

Kansas

29.9

33.2

40.4

36.7

35.8

Kentucky

37.2

40.2

45.8

42.6

30.9

Louisiana

24.0

25.3

27.3

36.8

28.5

Massachusetts

20.4

23.1

32.7

32.7

33.2

Maryland

40.0

41.2

48.1

41.6

43.3

Maine

16.1

23.3

40.4

21.8

11.4

Michigan

32.3

35.2

44.2

36.5

26.1

Minnesota

30.2

34.2

43.8

38.4

27.4

Missouri

40.4

44.6

54.8

36.3

31.0

Mississippi

31.0

32.1

35.0

34.6

23.9
15.1

Montana

33.2

14.2

26.8

18.1

North Carolina

28.2

28.6

33.3

40.4

22.0

North Dakota

29.2

26.3

38.1

36.3

18.3

Nebraska

28.8

31.3

48.4

34.9

30.1

New Hampshire

19.9

23.9

25.4

20.9

29.0

New Jersey

30.4

31.1

37.7

34.6

34.2

New Mexico

15.0

15.0

23.8

25.6

15.1

Nevada

18.0

19.2

29.6

22.0

15.3

New York

44.2

45.4

43.8

49.1

45.8

Ohio

35.8

38.4

44.8

35.9

30.9

Oklahoma

17.5

30.2

39.5

33.8

28.0

Oregon

22.1

25.8

45.1

35.8

22.8

Pennsylvania

37.6

39.6

51.5

39.0

41.3

Rhode Island

33.8

35.8

35.8

23.8

38.6

South Carolina

22.1

23.0

28.2

21.0

16.1

South Dakota

37.7

27.3

42.7

28.2

25.2

Tennessee

44.5

46.9

54.3

40.7

31.8

Texas

33.8

34.6

33.0

36.5

39.2
17.5

Utah

17.5

19.1

25.9

28.3

Virginia

28.4

29.2

37.1

46.5

36.6

Vermont

14.8

21.5

29.2

31.5

11.4

Washington

20.5

23.6

35.9

33.4

27.3
36.6

Wisconsin

39.5

43.8

63.3

33.0

West Virginia

29.3

33.7

38.9

34.2

27.7

Wyoming

21.7

22.0

37.3

25.1

20.9

Overall U.S.

40.2

42.2

47.2

50.1

50.9

Source: Authors’ analyses of U.S. Census Bureau data.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

residential segregation 69
York State and Tennessee to lows of less than 10 in Arizona
and Delaware. In Europe, the D’s range in size from 40.1 inEstonia to lows in the island countries of Iceland (1.2) and
Ireland (4.8). Although there are large differences in the sizesof minority populations in Europe and the U.S., there nevertheless is rather remarkable similarity in macro-segregation
across countries in Europe and states in the U.S.
Of course, these U.S. and European estimates hide variation insegregation across different minority populations. In the U.S.,
the most segregated minorities (data not shown) originate
from Central and South America (68.1) and Oceania (65.1),
while these origins account for the least amount of minority

segregation in European countries in the EU (40.8). The rangeof overall D’s in the U.S. are much smaller. They range from alow of 42.2 among blacks to highs of 50.1 among Asians and50.9 among Hispanics, differences that presumably reflect
regional differences in minority population concentration (i.e.,
Asians in the West and Hispanics in the Southwest).
Micro-Segregation: Segregation within Cities
Both in the U.S. and Europe, racial and ethnic minorities tend
to settle in areas that are disproportionately composed ofother minorities, often made up of their own ethnoracial background or nationality. In the U.S., previous studies show that
racial neighborhood segregation between blacks and whites

TABLE 2. European County Equivalent Citizen-Noncitizen Segregation Indices, Circa 2010

AfricaCentral& SouthAmerica

North
America

Asia

Oceania

27.2

42.8

31.7

36.8

32.2

33.3

27.4

42.9

43.9

49.2

31.9

44.2

19.7

14.2

41.5

31.5

37.4

37.2

48.6

19.0

18.3

49.0

37.5

28.2

36.2

41.4

22.7

34.7

38.2

41.0

47.1

61.9

31.9

49.4

17.1

40.9

41.0

35.2

35.3

24.3

30.9

40.1

16.8

19.2

17.5

24.8

25.0

23.6

21.0

17.1

19.8

26.7

23.5

31.5

36.8

32.6

45.5

37.9

35.3

42.8

Germany

27.2

27.4

28.7

28.9

40.2

30.2

39.7

29.7

39.8

Greece

16.5

21.0

16.3

13.2

39.6

30.9

29.3

31.9

27.5

Hungary

24.6

22.5

36.9

27.9

45.1

41.2

42.9

53.1

49.9

Iceland

1.2

0.9

8.9

1.3

10.0

10.5

12.3

11.5

14.7

All

European
Union

Non-EU

Non-EU
EuropeAustria

24.6

Belgium

31.0

22.0

28.9

32.6

34.4

Bulgaria
Croatia

19.1

25.9

19.1

25.0

Czech
Republic

30.2

Estonia

40.1

FinlandFranceCountries

Ireland

4.8

2.4

11.4

8.8

10.5

16.2

6.3

14.2

6.4

Italy

23.9

23.2

26.8

30.3

31.4

41.0

27.4

34.4

29.0

Lithuania

26.0

22.6

26.6

26.9

23.2

27.1

30.3

25.2

42.4

Netherlands

23.5

23.0

26.2

21.1

33.4

33.0

38.4

25.1

38.1

Norway

14.0

14.4

13.7

14.2

12.8

22.2

24.1

16.8

21.6

Poland

30.8

30.4

33.4

32.0

33.4

47.0

47.0

49.2

80.0

Portugal

35.6

31.7

37.7

30.2

52.5

35.2

29.5

31.1

29.3

Romania

39.4

35.4

44.1

34.2

58.6

48.7

42.0

55.8

78.1

Slovakia

13.5

15.2

15.1

18.5

19.4

24.0

20.5

21.3

25.1

Slovenia

14.4

16.6

14.3

14.1

24.9

20.8

26.9

23.0

25.0

Spain

23.7

27.8

24.3

28.2

31.6

23.5

26.3

33.0

29.6

Sweden

14.1

20.8

9.8

15.0

16.5

31.8

22.1

13.0

21.7

Switzerland

14.3

17.5

14.8

16.6

30.9

31.5

41.8

17.4

39.9

UnitedKingdom

38.9

35.8

36.9

39.0

42.1

50.6

40.2

37.8

45.9

Overall
Europe

38.0

40.8

39.3

52.5

50.4

68.1

49.6

45.0

65.1

Source: Eurostat. Note: Noncitizens are considered as minorities in this analysis. All = All countries in the world other than the reporting country; European Union = Members of the European Union;
Non-EU = All countries in the world except EU members; Non-EU Europeans = Countries of Europe that are not members of European Union.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

70

residential segregation

is high (averaging roughly 60 across the largest U.S. cities in2010), while Asian-white neighborhood segregation is comparatively low (D at roughly 40), with Hispanics occupying
an intermediate position (D’s centering around 50).7 Despite
long-term declines, African Americans continue to face substantial residential segregation, along with its correlates ofconcentrated poverty, older dilapidated housing stock, andchronic joblessness. Previous studies also show that segregation among America’s fastest-growing minority populations
is now at a standstill or even increasing in some metropolitan areas, especially those with large numbers of Hispanic or
Asian immigrant populations (e.g., Los Angeles). In Europe,
there are many fewer ethnically diverse metropolitan cities,
especially if levels of diversity are benchmarked against thosein large cities in the U.S., where 58 of the largest 100 cities
now have majority-minority populations.
To highlight comparative patterns of neighborhood segregation in Europe, we begin by mapping the distribution of
immigrants across neighborhoods in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, which are distinguished from Brussels and London—two

TABLE 3. Citizen-Noncitizen Segregation in
European Cities, Circa 2010

City

D

Amsterdam

23.00

Brussels

19.21

London

24.24

Rotterdam

30.54

FIGURE 3.

of the most diverse cities in Europe, with large and growing
immigrant populations.8 In each case, these maps (Figure 3)
reveal highly uneven patterns of minority concentration, withunusually large concentrations in the city centers and smaller
concentrations at the periphery. The D’s in these cities (Table3), however, are much lower than they are for previously published U.S. estimates of segregation of big-city ethnoracial
minority and immigrant populations. D’s range in size from
19.21 in Brussels to 30.54 in Rotterdam (a city that is generally regarded as the most diverse city in the Netherlands, witha large immigrant population).
To be sure, it is no easy task to identify cities in the U.S. withcomparable patterns of recent immigration and growing racialand ethnic diversity. For our purposes, we have mappedneighborhood racial composition (white-nonwhite) in U.S. cities that demographer Audrey Singer has recently identified as“post-WWII gateways” (Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami,
Riverside, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.) and “major
emerging gateways” (Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Las Vegas,
Orlando, and Phoenix).9 These 13 cities are distinguished

Neighborhood Noncitizen Population in European Cities

Rotterdam Neighborhoods

London Boroughs

Source: Central Bureau of Statistics (Amsterdam andRotterdam), Statistics Belgium (Brussels), and Officefor National Statistics (London).

Amsterdam Neighborhoods

Source: Eurostat, Statistics Netherlands Population Register, Statistics Belgium Census Data.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

Brussels
Neighborhoods

residential segregation 71
by their recent immigrant growth and therefore are arguably
most closely matched to the contemporary immigrant experiences in the four European cities considered above, all ofwhich experienced immigration in large numbers after WorldWar II.
The maps shown in Figures 4 and 5 reveal highly centralized minority populations in the central (or principal) city andnearby older surrounding suburbs and much lower minority
shares in the newer suburbs and peripheral or exurban areas,
which typically are much less densely settled but within easy
commuting distance to employment in the city. Althoughthese segregation patterns are similar in kind to those foundin Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels, and London, the magnitude of minority segregation in these U.S. cities is muchgreater (see Table 4). For example, segregation within the city
limits is often very high, a pattern of neighborhood exclusionthat is evident in the maps (which highlight largely “white”
neighborhoods). For example, in Atlanta, a major emerging
immigrant gateway, our estimate of white-nonwhite segregation is 66.6, even as segregation for the entire metro region

FIGURE 4.

U.S. Post-WWII Gateways, 2010is much lower at 50.4. This lower estimate seemingly reflects
the spatial spread of nonwhite minorities into nearby metropolitan suburbs.
Comparatively low segregation rates are found in the city of
Las Vegas and its metro region overall (37.4 and 32.8), andin Riverside, California, where D’s for the city and metro area
are 30.2 and 38.9, respectively. Riverside, along with Miami,
were the only places where segregation in the city was lower
than segregation throughout the entire metropolitan region, afinding that may suggest the relative concentration of whites
in the city vis-à-vis suburban areas, perhaps providing someevidence of white gentrification. The bottom line is nevertheless clear: Levels of minority segregation within contemporary
U.S. immigrant gateway cities far exceed segregation levelsin Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels, and London.
Other Studies of Immigrant Segregation
Our attempt at providing comparative empirical estimates ofsegregation (across alternative geographic scales) in the U.S.
and Europe has arguably come at the expense of highlighting

FIGURE 5.

U.S. Emerging Gateways, 2010>_

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Decennial Census.

>_

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Decennial Census.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

72

residential segregation

the diversity of immigrant experiences across different national
origin populations and the European continent. Recently
published reviews by Richard Alba and Nancy Foner, John
Iceland, and Douglas S. Massey have documented several
case studies of segregation across many different European
cities (see reference section for complete citations). Theseestimates are summarized in Figure 6.
These city-specific segregation estimates provide at least
three generalizations. First, minority-majority segregationis less extreme among European (or EU) immigrants than it
is among other new arrivals originating from non-Westerncontinents (i.e., Asia, Africa, or South America). Second,neighborhood segregation from the native population (mostwhite ethnicities) tends to be much higher among darkskinned immigrants (e.g., Bangladeshis in UK, Ethopians
and Somalians in Sweden, or Turks in France) than lighterskinned immigrants, which is a pattern similar to the relatively
high black-white segregation rates found historically in the
U.S. Third, some national-origin groups, especially those withTABLE 4. Non-Hispanic White-Nonwhite Segregation (D) in U.S. Major
Emerging and Post-WWII Gateways, 2010

City

Metro Area

Atlanta

66.56

50.38

Austin

43.34

38.48

Charlotte

48.50

46.07

Las Vegas

37.40

32.80

Orlando

42.32

38.24

Phoenix

52.35

43.46

Dallas

58.30

45.85

Houston

57.32

49.99

Los Angeles

58.44

54.54

Miami

49.42

54.15

Riverside

30.18

38.90

San Diego

47.26

42.70

Washington, D.C.

63.11

46.62

Major Emerging Gateway

Post-WWII Gateway

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Decennial Census.

colonial histories, often are less segregated than more recent
immigrant groups. This finding may suggest more culturaland economic integration among older immigrant groups
than recently arrived groups. These groups would include, forexample, Moroccans in Amsterdam or Milan, Turks in Frankfurt or Cologne, or Algerians in Marseille.
Lessons Learned
High rates of majority-minority segregation throughout theWestern world present real social, cultural, and economic
barriers to full integration and social inclusion. Indeed, if segregation is viewed as a proxy measure of “social distance”
or cultural and economic integration between groups, theevidence presented here suggests that minorities in the U.S.
are perhaps less spatially assimilated than their immigrantcounterparts in Europe. Although we found that macro-segregation—the uneven minority distribution across counties—isremarkably similar in Europe and the U.S., micro-segregation(within cities) of minorities from whites is much higher on
average in the U.S. than in most European countries.
Of course, in the case of African Americans in the U.S., segregation clearly remains “exceptional” and continues to be
shaped by past slavery and a history of social exclusion anddiscrimination in the job and housing markets. Segregationis seemingly passed down from generation to generation.10
Although some observers claim that there is no parallel casein Europe, this remains a debatable point. A small but growing literature suggests that many Muslim populations (e.g.,
Bangladeshis in London or Arabs in Paris) experience exceptionally high rates of both macro- and micro-segregation. Still,compared with the size of the U.S. African-American population, these ethno-religious minorities are comparatively small
in number or percentage. And there is little indication thattoday’s European immigrant communities or neighborhoods
will become similarly ghettoized anytime soon on the broad
spatial scale observed in the U.S.11 The recent immigrantexperiences in much of Europe may more closely parallel
patterns of residential segregation among America’s Asiansand Hispanics.
Segregation reflects and reinforces economic inequality
and therefore represents an important component of thestratification system, both in the U.S. and Europe. Indeed,
segregation often overlaps with many other place-based
inequalities—poverty, unemployment, crime, and housing
quality and overcrowding. These overlapping disadvantages
are seemingly much more common in the U.S. than inEuropean countries, where government efforts to promote
integration (e.g., social and mixed-income housing) provide

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

residential segregation 73
a clear contrast to the market-driven solutions preferred in
the U.S.12 Our analysis of contemporary patterns of minority
segregation provides an empirical baseline for future researchthat explicitly links minority segregation to other place-based
inequalities, to patterns of concentrated poverty, and to thespecific social and demographic processes (e.g., native- or
white-flight, self-segregation, and housing discrimination)that are responsible for minority segregation and spatial
inequality.

FIGURE 6.

An important unanswered question, of course, is whether
current patterns of minority segregation—segregation of“the other”—will persist into the future. In the U.S., the lawof the land applies equally to citizens and noncitizens, andthe motivations to emigrate to the U.S. often involve the pursuit of the “American Dream.” For those who come legally,
America provides the opportunity for immigrants to develop
a new national identity and to move up the socioeconomic
ladder. Whether this is true for immigrants in Europe is lessSegregation Indices for Groups in Europe and the U.S., Circa 2010

Birmingham	
  Bangladeshi	  ED	
  London	  Bangladeshi	  ED	
  Antwerp	  N.	
  African,	  Bosnian,	  metro	
  Birmingham	
  Bangladeshi	  Birmingham	  Pakistani	
  Manchester	  Bangladeshi	  London	  Bangladeshi	
  U.S.	
  Large	
  Metro	
  Blacks	
  Brussels	
  Moroccan	
  Stockholm	
  Iranian	
  14	
  mun.	
  Bristol	
  Black	
  Caribbean	  Turks	
  French	
  average	  Manchester	  Pakistani	
  London	  Pakistani	
  U.S.	
  Large	
  Metro	  Hispanics	  Manchester	
  Black	
  Caribbbean	  The	  Hague	
  Moroccan	
  London	  Black	
  Caribbean	  Turks	
  RoEerdam	
  RoEerdam	
  Moroccans	
  Birmingham	
  Black	
  Caribbean	  The	  Hague	  MinoriYes	
  Turks	
  Amsterdam	
  Amsterdam	
  Turks	
  369	
  Amsterdam	
  Moroccans	
  U.S.	
  Large	
  Metro	
  Asians	
  Moroccans	
  RoEerdam	
  Moroccans	
  Amsterdam	
  Algerians	
  French	
  average	  Bradford	
  Black	
  Caribbean	  Oldham	  Black	
  Caribbean	  Birmingham	
  Black	
  African	
  Amsterdam	
  Surinamese	  Turin	
  Chinese	
  Vienna	  Foreigners	
  Leicester	
  Black	
  Caribbean	  Düsseldorf	
  Turks	  Oslo	
  3rd	
  world	
  immigrants	  Africans	
  Turin	  	
  RoEerdam	  Surinamese	  Lille	
  non-­‐French	
  Milan	
  West	  Europeans	
  &	
  N.	
  Amer.	
  Surinamese	  Amsterdam	
  Paris	
  Algerians	
  Frankfurt	
  Americans	
  Turin	
  Romanians	
  Surinamese	
  RoEerdam	
  Milan	  Filipino	
  	
  	
  	
  
Milan	
  non-­‐Italian	  Frankfurt	
  Turks	  Rome	
  Africans	
  Africans	
  Rome	  Munich	  Foreigners	
  
0	
  

10	
  

20	
  

30	
  

40	
  

50	
  

60	
  

70	
  

80	
  

90	
  

Source: Adapted from Sako (2005), Iceland (2014), Alba and Foner (2015), Logan and Stults (2011), and Arbaci and Malheiros (2010).

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

74

residential segregation

clear; many new arrivals are refugees or lack a clear route tocitizenship or economic integration. Indeed, institutional andlegal accommodations in Europe may lag demographic realities. Residential segregation across European countries areoften wide-ranging and differ sharply among different minority populations. Whether today’s patterns will persist in the
future is much less obvious in the aftermath of the current
period of unprecedented international migration and ongoing
economic globalization.13 One concern is whether the growing anti-immigrant movement in Europe and in the U.S. will
not only result in new restrictions on immigration, but also,
perhaps more importantly, lead to cutbacks in government
efforts to promote integration through social housing, cash
assistance, or educational programs that directly or indirectly
promote minority integration into society. Policy choices willaffect whether segregation in ethnic communities or neighborhoods represents a way station or platform for full integration
or a chronic or permanent social condition that institutionalizes majority-minority social and economic inequality. ■Daniel T. Lichter is Ferris Family Professor in the Department of
Policy Analysis and Management, Professor of Sociology, andDirector of the Cornell Population Center at Cornell University.
He co-leads the Segregation Research Group at the Stanford
Center on Poverty and Inequality. Domenico Parisi is Professorof Sociology and Director of the National Strategic Planning andAnalysis Center at Mississippi State University. Helga de Valk istheme group leader, Migration and Migrants, at the Netherlands
Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute, and Professor of families
and life course at the University of Groningen (NL) and at Vrije
Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.

Appendix: Measuring Segregation
To compare recent patterns of residential segregation in
Europe and the U.S. requires data that are similar in spatial
scale (i.e., territorial size) and racial and ethnic (and immigrant) categories. Here we compare segregation across 26
countries in Europe and all 50 states in the U.S. Data for each
European country, county (or county equivalent), and neighborhood (census tract or district) come from the most recent
data available from Eurostat (circa 2010), while data from the
U.S. come from the 2010 decennial census. Segregation istypically measured using the index of dissimilarity (D), which
is defined as:k

Dt = ½ Σ |mit - wit|
i=1

where mit and wit are the respective percentages of the minority and majority populations residing in neighborhood (or othergeographical scale) i at time t. This index is based on pairwise comparisons, and varies from 0 (no segregation) to 100(complete segregation). D indicates the percentage of minorities that would have to move to other neighborhoods in orderto achieve parity between a minority population and whites intheir percentage distributions across all neighborhoods.

Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the helpful assistance and technical advice of Shrinidhi Ambinakudige, David Brady, Rafael
Costa, David Grusky, Matthew Hall, John Iceland, and Bart
Sleutjes. The co-authors alone are responsible for the accuracy and interpretation of data included in this report.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Arbaci, Sonia and Jorge Malheiros. 2010.
“De-Segregation, Peripheralisation and theSocial Exclusion of Immigrants: Southern
European Cities in the 1990s.” Journal of
Ethnic and Migration Studies 36, 227–255.

Johnson, Kenneth M., Layton Field, and Dudley
L. Poston. 2015. “More Deaths than Births:
Subnational Natural Decrease in Europe and theUnited States.” Population and Development
Review 41(4), 651–680.

Frey, William H. 2015. Diversity Explosion:
How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking
America. Washington, D.C.: Brookings
Institution.

Lichter, Daniel T. 2013. “Integration or
Fragmentation? Racial Diversity and theAmerican Future.” Demography 50, 359–391.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

Musterd, Sako. 2005. “Social and Ethnic
Desegregation in Europe: Levels, Causes,
and Effects.” Journal of Urban Affairs 27(3),331–348.

residential segregation 75

NOTES
1. A comprehensive national portrait of immigration and integration is provided in the recently
released report of the National Academy of
Science: Waters, Mary C., and Marisa Gerstein
Pineau. 2015. The Integration of Immigrants into
American Society. Washington, D.C.: National
Academies Press. One of the unexpected
findings was the low rates of naturalization in
the U.S. compared to those in most European
countries with large immigrant influxes. The
full report is available online at http://sites.
nationalacademies.org/dbasse/cpop/integration_of_immigrants/.
2. Beginning with the Schengen Agreementin 1985, the free movement of Europeans
throughout the continent has been made easierby eliminating or easing border checks and visa
requirements while still imposing controls on
movement into and out of much of Europe itself(i.e., the so-called Schengen Area). Incipient native depopulation and natural decrease, in turn,have created labor shortages and new demands
for immigrant workers. Transnational migration
also has accelerated globally. The European
Union has been reshaped by an unprecedented
south-to-north movement of workers due toguest worker programs (e.g., Turks in Germany
or Moroccans in the Netherlands) and therapid growth of new immigrant groups fromformer European colonies. For example, France(especially in the Paris region) is now home toimmigrants from outside of Europe, often fromex-colonies in Northern Africa, West Africa, andIndochina. Since the late 1990s, net immigration
in England has spiked upward, with large influxes of low-skill workers from Eastern Europe(e.g., Bulgaria and Romania) and of noncitizens
from outside the EU. Europe has been on thefrontline of refugee and displaced populations
outside of Europe. Germany is on pace to accept more than 1 million new Syrian refugees in2015 alone.

3. Of course, some European countries,
such as Germany and Sweden, became newdestinations much earlier after WWII than others(such as Finland or Eastern Europe), attracting
new immigrants from Turkey, Italy, Spain, andelsewhere. For a useful comparative discussionof immigration and integration in North America
and Europe, see Alba, Richard, and Nancy
Foner. 2015. Stranger No More: Immigration and
the Challenges of Integration in North America
and Western Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
4. A 2013 Pew report (“Second-Generation
Americans: A Portrait of the Adult Childrenof Immigrants”) based on the 2012 American
Community Survey showed that America’s
immigrant stock—defined as first and second
generations—is overwhelmingly composed of
racial and ethnic minority populations.
5. We estimate minority concentration andsegregation in Europe using the units definedby the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for
Statistics (NUTS), which, according to Johnson
et al. (2015:655), takes into account “existing
geographic and political divisions in each
European country to produce standard spatial
units that permit cross-national comparisons.”
For our purposes we use NUTS3 units, whichclosely resemble counties as defined in the U.S.
6. For discussions of segregation at different
scales of geography, see Lichter, DanielT., Domenico Parisi, and Michael Taquino.
2015. “Toward a New Macro-Segregation?
Decomposing Segregation Within and Between
Metropolitan Cities and Suburbs,” American
Sociological Review, 80, 843–873; and Reardon,
Sean F., Stephen A. Matthews, David O’Sullivan,
Barrett A. Lee, Glenn Firebaugh, Chad R.
Farrell, and Kendra Bischoff. 2008. “TheGeographic Scale of Metropolitan Segregation.”
Demography, 45, 489–514. We recognize, ofcourse, that the sizes of different accounting
units (e.g., tracts or districts, counties or NUTS
units) can affect estimates of D, a fact thatargues for cautious interpretations.

PATHWAYS • The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

7. See, for example, Logan, John R., and Brian
J. Stults. 2011. The Persistence of Segregationin the Metropolis: New Findings from the 2010
Census. New York: Russell Sage Foundation
and Brown University. This book provides thefirst set of estimates of segregation based on
the 2010 decennial census. Segregation measures for metropolitan areas and big cities areavailable at http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010/index.htm.
8. David Coleman has coined the term “Third
Demographic Transition,” which refers to therapid ethnic transitions in many European
countries and reflects native depopulation,
coupled with high rates of immigration, alongwith above-replacement levels of fertility.
See Coleman, David. 2006. “Immigration andEthnic Change in Low-Fertility Countries: A
Third Demographic Transition.” Population andDevelopment Review, 32(3), 401–446.
9. See the report titled Metropolitan Immigrant
Gateways Revisited, 2014, which is available
online at http://www.brookings.edu/research/
papers/2015/12/01-metropolitan-immigrantgateways-revisited-singer.
10. See Sharkey, Patrick. 2013. Stuck in Place:
Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress
Toward Racial Equality. Chicago, Il: University of
Chicago Press.
11. See Alba and Foner (2015).
12. See Alba and Foner (2015); Iceland, John.
2014. Residential Segregation: A TransAtlantic Analysis. Washington, D.C.: Migration
Policy Institute; and Massey, Douglas S.
2016. “Segregation and the Perpetuation of
Disadvantage.” In The Oxford Handbook ofSocial Science and Poverty (David Brady and
Linda M. Burton, eds.). New York: Oxford
University Press, 369–393.
13. In fact, Douglas Massey (2016) suggeststhat segregation in Europe and the U.S. is now
converging at “moderate” levels, a pattern heattributes to declining segregation in the U.S.
(especially among blacks and immigrant populations) and to increasing segregation in Europe.

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