Over the past 20 years the incidence of relative poverty among Britain's children has tripled. These changes are related to increased earnings inequality, growth in the number of single (lone) parent households, and an increased share of households with children with no working adult. The Labour Government has responded by adopting as a policy objective ending child poverty by 2020. Initial steps toward this end include increasing direct financial support to families with children, creating financial incentives for work for parents, adopting more intensive case management for the welfare caseload, and ameliorating the long-term consequences of the deprivation poverty brings. The Working Families' Tax Credit (WFTC) is the centerpiece of the financial support innovations but there is a broader swathe of welfare reforms which has received less attention. Overall, the U.K. system provides more generous support to the lowest-income families than is available in the U.S., and recent reforms have directly reduced child poverty. For most households, the reforms have reduced marginal benefit deduction rates and increased incentives to work. Preliminary evidence suggests the changes have had greatest effect on single parents. Continued progress requires the adoption of a more specific procedure for defining and measuring child poverty. Keywords: Welfare, inequality, in-work benefits, child poverty.
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Paper provided by Institute for Fiscal Studies in its series IFS Working Papers with number
W01/08.
Length: 48 pp Date of creation: Apr 2001 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:01/08
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Richard Blundell & Hilary W. Hoynes, 2004.
"Has 'In-Work' Benefit Reform Helped the Labor Market?,"
NBER Chapters,
in: Seeking a Premier Economy: The Economic Effects of British Economic Reforms, 1980-2000, pages 411-460
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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