Long-Term Poverty and Disability Among Working-Age Adults

The authors use longitudinal data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation spanning 1996 to 1999 to estimate the prevalence of short- and long-term poverty among working-age people with and without disabilities. Depending on the disability measure used, annual poverty rates are 2 to 5 times higher among people with disabilities compared to those without disabilities. The relative long-term poverty rates among those with disabilities are much higher than the relative short-term poverty rates. People with disabilities represented 47% of those in poverty in 1997 according to an annual measure of poverty and 65% of those in poverty according to a long-term measure. The reasons that disability receives little attention in the poverty literature may be that most statistics are based on short-term measures, which partially mask the strong relationship between long-term poverty and long-term disability, and outdated perceptions of the relationship between disability and the ability to work.

[1]  P. Taubman,et al.  Health and labor market success: the role of various diseases. , 1979, The review of economics and statistics.

[2]  Further Evidence on the Economic Effects of Poor Health , 1985 .

[3]  J. Hd..  Americans with Disabilities 1991-1992 , 1994 .

[4]  M. Baldwin,et al.  Gender Differences in Wage Losses from Impairments: Estimates from the Survey of Income and Program Participation , 1994 .

[5]  Constance F. Citro,et al.  Measuring poverty : a new approach , 1995 .

[6]  R. Kessler,et al.  The social consequences of psychiatric disorders, III: probability of marital stability. , 1998, The American journal of psychiatry.

[7]  Mark R. Rank,et al.  The Likelihood of Poverty across the American Adult Life Span , 1999 .

[8]  J. Mcneil.  EMPLOYMENT, EARNINGS, AND DISABILITY , 2000 .

[9]  T. Hale.  The Lack of a Disability Measure in Today's Current Population Survey , 2001 .

[10]  A. Nichols,et al.  Tracking the Household Income of SSDI and SSI Applicants , 2001 .

[11]  Patricia C. Higginbottom,et al.  Americans with Disabilities , 2001 .

[12]  A. Houtenville,et al.  Self-Reported Work Limitation Data: What They Can and Cannot Tell Us , 2002 .

[13]  Caroline E. Ratcliffe,et al.  Transition Events in the Dynamics of Poverty , 2002 .

[14]  John Iceland.  Dynamics of Economic Well-Being: Poverty 1996-1999. Current Population Reports. , 2003 .

[15]  S. Nelson,et al.  A Guide to Disability Statistics from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. Washington, DC: Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. and The Urban Institute , 2006 .

[16]  Caroline E. Ratcliffe,et al.  Events that Trigger Poverty Entries and Exits , 2005 .

[17]  A. Houtenville,et al.  Rising Poverty in the Midst of Plenty: The Case of Working-Age People with Disabilities , 2005 .

[18]  M. Austin.  Understanding Poverty , 2007 .

[19]  G. Livermore,et al.  Material Hardship, Poverty, and Disability Among Working-Age Adults , 2007 .