Explaining the Gender Poverty Gap in Developed and Transitional Economies

As economies throughout the world experience large and wrenching changes, poverty has increasingly become a problem in country after country. This is true regardless of whether these changes result from globalization, the economic transition from socialism to capitalism, increasing marketization and privatization, or some other major economic transformation (Aslanbeigui, Pressman, Summerfield 1994; Funk and Mueller 1993; Moghadam 1996). A concomitant, disturbing aspect of rising poverty throughout the world is that poverty has increasingly become feminized-women are much more likely than men to be poor. This phenomenon was first noticed in the United States (Pearce 1978, 1989; Pressman 1988), but more recently the problem of the feminization of poverty has become an international concern as well (Casper, McLanahan, and Garfinkel 1994; Pressman 1998; Wright 1995). This article employs the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) to compare poverty rates for female-headed households (FHHs) with poverty rates for other households in a number of developed and transitional economies. It then seeks to explain why, in some countries, female-headed households are so much more likely to be poor compared with other families. The next two sections, respectively, describe the LIS and discuss some of the problems encountered in measuring poverty. The paper then computes poverty rates in individual countries for female-headed households and for all other households using the LIS database. Given the problems associated with measuring poverty, I present several estimates of poverty for both types of household. Two sections then look at a couple of