Poverty Rate For Kids Declines

The poverty rate among American children has decreased since it hit high levels in the early 1990s, and the South is breaking its history as a pocket of the poor, a study released Thursday shows.

Despite the improvement, the poverty rate for children still is higher than 20 years ago, according to the report by the National Center for Children in Poverty, a non-partisan research center at Columbia University.

About 13.3 million U.S. children lived in poverty in 1998, the most recent year for which data is available. They represented almost 19 percent of the country’s 71 million children.

In 1979, 16 percent of the nation’s then 63 million children lived in poverty.

The rate reached a recent high in 1993, when 22.5 percent of American youngsters lived in poverty.

The study analyzed annual income data from the Census Bureau for 1979 through 1998.

In 1998, the poverty threshold for a family of four was an annual income below $16,600. The formula used to determine the poverty rate hadn’t changed in three decades except for inflation adjustments.