Poverty Disparities and the Reconfiguration of Social Provisioning: White, Black, and Latino Single-Mother Families, 1996–2018

Changes in US social provisioning from 1996 to 2018 profoundly affected the well-being of single-mother families, with notable consequences for racial inequalities in poverty alleviation. Using an institutional approach to racial disparities alongside a sequence-independent decomposition analysis, we group policies and programs into five redistributive mechanisms—federal transfers, state transfers, federal income taxes, state income taxes, and federal payroll taxes—and estimate their effects on poverty reduction for White, Black, and Latino single-mother families. We find that although poverty declined, racial disparities in poverty rates persisted. State transfers had the greatest impact on poverty alleviation but declined substantially in effectiveness after 2012, while federal taxes, particularly for Latino families, became more effective. This study underscores enduring racial disparities in the reduction of single-mother poverty while highlighting the complex interplay of policy design, decentralization, and poverty outcomes.