Guest Post: New Findings on Asset Poverty in Canada and Developments on Asset Poverty Measurement
Blog Post
May 5, 2014
Editor's Note: This guest blog post was written by David W. Rothwell, Assistant Professor at the McGill University School of Social Work, and Yunju Nam, Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work.
Asset poverty
The most common method of economic poverty measurement requires defining of a minimal level of basic needs and economic resources. Economic poverty can be measured using income, consumption, or wealth; subjective or objective criteria; multiple or single dimensions; and, from relative and absolute perspectives. In advanced economies, the predominate method for understanding economic poverty relies on annual household income as an indicator of command over resources. There are disagreements over methods to understand income poverty (e.g., see the Institute for Research on Poverty’s overview here). The U.S. poverty line is an absolute measure. Relative measures are used for international comparison.
In the 1980s and early 1990s scholars began challenging the reliance on income to understand household well-being. They argued that savings and asset accumulation function as more than stored income to be used for future consumption (see seminal works by Oliver and Shapiro (1990); Sherraden (1991)). According to Sherraden, when people accumulate assets, they think and behave differently; and the world responds to them differently. Assets function not as a flow but as a stock and are more permanent. Following these ideas, economic deprivation, i.e., poverty, can be measured using assets instead of income. Studies of asset poverty complement and contrast our understanding of the poverty condition.
Economists Robert Haveman and Edward Wolff considered a household or person asset poor if their access to wealth-type resources is insufficient to meet basic needs for some predefined period of time. Wealth-type resources usually involves financial assets or net worth; basic needs can be approximated with the income poverty threshold; and, period of time has usually been set at three months. Therefore, a person or household is considered asset poor if their asset resources fall below one-fourth of the official income poverty line. Concretely, assuming the annual income poverty threshold for a family of four is $32,000, the household would be considered asset poor if owned assets were less than $8,000.
Asset Poverty in Canada
Recently, we estimated the first known asset poverty measures in Canada using the 1999 and 2005 Survey of Financial Security. We produced asset poverty rates based on (1) both financial assets and net worth, (2) the Canadian Low Income Cutoff as the threshold of basic needs, and (3) three months as the period time. In the paper we reported the national asset poverty rates to be 53 percent based on financial assets and 34 percent based on net worth. Below we highlight key findings and contextualize them with U.S. asset poverty findings.
Asset poverty is closely related to age. Figure 1 shows how the rate of financial asset poverty decreases with age. The line represents the rate of asset poverty across the life course. The shaded area reveals the uncertainty around the given asset poverty estimate. It is well known that younger people have struggled in the recovery from the Recession. This finding suggests a need for social policy targeted at younger households.
Joint income and asset poverty
When the joint distribution of poverty based on income and assets is considered we were able to identify three sub-populations: (1) 14 percent of households were joint income and asset poor, (2) 3 percent of households were income poor but asset non-poor, and (3) 40 percent of households were income non-poor but asset poor. The third group reveals that a large segment of the Canadian population has sufficient income to be non-poor but lacks access to assets to survive for three months at the low income threshold. Future policy efforts will play a role in reducing or reinforcing this economic vulnerability.
Comparison with U.S. asset poverty
Differences in measurements and survey design make cross-country comparisons difficult. (For example, using 2001 data, Haveman and Wolff reported that 25 percent of U.S. households were poor based on net worth compared to the Canadian estimate of 34 percent. Using financial assets, the disparity was greater: 53 percent in Canada compared to 38 percent in the U.S.) It is better to examine systematic cross-country data. Brandolini and colleagues used data from the Luxembourg Wealth Study (years 1999-2002) to compare the asset poverty rates in several OECD countries. Using 50 percent of the median income as the income threshold, they reported that Canada had the highest financial asset poverty rates at 56.5 followed by the US (52.6).
It is perhaps more useful to examine over representation among the asset poor. The most recent CFED scorecard, showed the 2011 liquid asset poverty in the US was 43.5 percent and these rates were analyzed separately based on race and family structure. The rate of white households compared to households of color was 34.7 to 60.6. The rate of asset poverty among single parent households is nearly double that of two-parent households (1.94). The analysis showed that 17 percent of Americans are in extreme asset poverty, i.e., they have negative or zero net worth. In the Canadian study, we decomposed asset poverty rates to understand over-representation. We created a disproportionate index where 1 is perfectly representative of the population rate.
Although not perfectly comparable with the CFED and Haveman results (e.g., race and ethnicity is not measured in the Canadian survey), there are some parallels between Canada and the U.S. Asset poverty is disproportionately experienced by female single parents, younger people, and renters.
Our recent study reinforces the importance of asset poverty measurement to understand dimensions of poverty and economic vulnerability that go unnoticed when using an income based measure of poverty.
Importantly, the method of asset poverty measurement used in the U.S. and Canadian studies assumes that households need a certain amount of asset to meet consumption needs at the poverty threshold. In addition to asset poverty measures described above, new and more comprehensive asset-based economic well-being measures have been recently developed in the United States. These measures incorporate the "asset for development" perspective in that they recognize assets’ roles in promoting long-term economic development as well as assets’ roles in protecting families from unexpected economic emergencies (Nam, Huang, & Sherraden (2008)). For example, the Asset Security and Opportunity Index produced by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandies University includes asset opportunity as well asset security. The asset security index measures economic stability and a type of precautionary savings. While asset security is similar to asset poverty (i.e., assets needed for the period of unemployment), asset opportunity is a fundamentally different concept: it is based on the amount of economic resources needed for a family’s investment for the future (i.e. assets for college education, homeownership, and business start-up). Using this concept, over 50 percent of U.S. households have insufficient assets to promote social development (Shapiro, Oliver, and Meschede (2009)).
In addition to precautionary savings for the time of unemployment, the U.S. Department of Commerce (2010) highlighted the importance of two asset measures: savings for college education and retirement. College savings amounts are estimated from zero to $6,800 per year depending on family type and income while retirement savings is assessed as 1.2% to 3.3% of annual family income (U.S. Department of Commerce (2010)). The most comprehensive asset measure is included in a new framework called the Basic Economic Security Table (BEST): precautionary, retirement, homeownership and college education (McMahon, Nam, & Lee (2011)). Using the BEST, we estimated that monthly savings required to meet all four saving needs ranged from $155 to $572 depending on family size and conditions.
References
Brandolini, Andrea, Silvia Magri, Timothy M. Smeeding. 2010. “Asset-Based Measurement of Poverty.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 29(2): 267–84.
Haveman, Robert and Edward N. Wolff. 2005. “The concept and measurement of asset poverty: Levels, trends and composition for the U.S., 1983–2001.” The Journal of Economic Inequality 2(2): 145-69.
Nam, Yunju, Jin Huang, and Michael Sherraden. 2008. “Assets, Poverty, and Public Policy: Challenges in Definition and Measurement.” St. Louis, MO: Center for Social Development.
Oliver, Melvin L. and Thomas M. Shapiro. 1990. “Wealth of a Nation: A Reassessment of Asset Inequality in America Shows At Least One Third of Households Are Asset-poor.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 49(2): 129–51.
Shapiro, Thomas, Melvin Oliver, and Tatjana Meschede. 2009. Research and Policy Brief: The Asset Security and Opportunity Index. The Institute on Assets and Social Policy, Heller School, Brandeis University.
Sherraden, Michael. 1991. Assets and the poor: A new American welfare policy. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
U.S. Department of Commerce. 2010. “Middle Class in America.” Report to the Office of the Vice President of the United States, Middle Class Task Force. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration.