Poverty of Families with Children: Problems of Definition and Measurement, Regional Characteristics

Abstract

The Object of the Study. Families with children.The Subject of the Study. The poverty of families with children.The Purpose of the Study. Studying of the characteristics and the ability to measure the poverty level of families with children, at the regional level in particular.The Main Provisions of the Article. The article deals with devoted to the methodological aspects of the poverty of families with children and the peculiarities of its study in recent decades. The standard of living of families and the poverty of families with children have traditionally been considered as socioeconomic problems, and therefore the tasks of reducing poverty and cutting the income deficit have been formulated as tasks within the framework of social policy, taking into account the constraints imposed by resource opportunities. At the same time, in demography and the economics of the family, the standard of living of families has always been considered as one of the important factors in the formation of the family and the fertility, affecting the number of children in the family, births postponing and giving up subsequent births, and family stability. The article justifies the urgency of the poverty of families with children reducing problem, since this category of families currently stands at approximately 60% of all poor families in Russia. Existing definitions of poverty and approaches to its measurement, indicators of poverty dynamics, sources and types of statistical data available to researchers for poverty analysis at the regional level are considered, and three types of effects have been determined: economic effect (growth of purchasing power of families with children, expansion of opportunities for combining work with the family life, incentives for the development of relevant sectors that produce goods and services for families with children); social effect (reduction of social and gender inequality, increasing of starting opportunities for development of children in families with low income) and demographic effect (allowing more families to plan children's births freely and responsibly, realizing their desire to have several children, slowing down the forthcoming birth rate decline, enabling to raise more healthy and educated children).