The impact of precise geographic adjustments on the Supplemental Poverty Measure

• In Event: Poverty Measurement: New Advances, Insights and Policy Implications

Abstract

The official poverty measure of the United States remains unequipped to appropriately capture poverty across America. As a result, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) has increasingly supplanted the official measure in policy analysis and statistics. A primary point of conflict among poverty-focused scholars regarding the SPM is its current geographic adjustment, which adjusts poverty thresholds at three spatial scales: identified metropolitan areas, unidentified metropolitan areas by state, and nonmetropolitan areas by state. Pooling all nonmetropolitan counties within each state into a single adjustment is believed to be responsible for the ‘flip’ in the rural-urban poverty differential between the official measure and the SPM. Using federally restricted data, we address this conflict and generate novel estimates of the SPM using county-specific, hybrid, and commuting-zone geographic adjustments. Our estimates illustrate the role of the current adjustment in our understanding of rural-urban poverty, while also demonstrating the utility of our preferred commuting-zone-level adjustment. From this, we will leverage the recent release of our state-level estimates from the FSRDC system to explore the potential drivers of state-level variation as well as the role of flat transfers across space (e.g. SNAP, EITC, and CTC) on geographic variation in the Supplemental Poverty Measure.

Author

• J. Tom Mueller, University of Kansas
  Presenting Author