Poverty and the single mother household: the impacts on employment and family structure

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26360057
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Gender
• Research Institution: Kobe Gakuin University
• Principal Investigator: TAMIYA Yuko 神戸学院大学, 経済学部, 准教授 (90411868)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: 母子世帯 / 貧困率 / 三世代同居 / 配偶関係

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study focuses on the effectiveness of familial resources, employment and transfers on poverty reduction for single-mother households. The rise in single mothers living in multigenerational families, and the associated high poverty rates, suggested that intergenerational support and sharing resources are an important livelihood strategy for single mothers. Although for them the motivation for living with parents was exchanging care support rather than escaping from poverty. The trend showed that the divorced mothers had the highest poverty rate followed by widowed and unmarried. The effectiveness of transfers on poverty reduction was seen in cases of the widowed and came to be seen only from the mid 2000's for divorced-mothers. Regarding the impact of the increasing poverty rate, changes in the composition ratio of single mothers were less than that of market income. Since the mid-2000’s, rising of poverty rates had been canceled out by the poverty reduction effect of transfers.

Free Research Field

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