| Abstract: | This paper compares the economic well-being of children and the elderly to each other in the United States and across six industrialized countries. Using the Luxembourg Income Study database, we find that U.S. children–whose economic status is measured by their family income–are generally worse off than U.S. elderly in terms of both poverty and adjusted mean income. Moreover, U.S. children are worse off in terms of higher poverty rates than are the children in any of the other countries studied. The paper presents a variety of explanations for these differences. |
