Poverty and Income Transfer Policy at the State Level

This note presents a method for developing data on poverty at the state level and applies it to produce estimates of state poverty for the mid-1980s. The findings are based on four alternative measures of poverty: the official one, pretransfer poverty, prewelfare poverty and pre-state-transfer poverty, a new measure especially useful for analyzing the impact of state transfer policies on poverty. The data are reported and then used to compare the antipoverty impact of states’income support policies.