The poverty rate fell in 2013, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, its first statistically significant decline since before the financial crisis.
The share of Americans officially living in poverty in 2013 was 14.5 percent, down from 15 percent in 2012. The number of people in poverty, 45.3 million, also fell slightly from the record 46.5 million in 2012, although that change was within the margin of error.
“The main reason we’re looking at” for the decline in the poverty rate, said Census official Chuck Nelson, “is the growth in year-round full-time employment.” There were 2.8 million people working full time year-round in 2013 than in 2012, according to the release.
For 2013, the official federal poverty level for a family of four with two children was $23,624 in income. The Census Bureau’s poverty thresholds, originally based on families’ food budgets, are intended as a statistical yardstick and do not necessarily capture what a family needs to live.
The news on income from Tuesday’s report, however, was less encouraging.
Real median household income, at $51,900, was only about $180 above the 2012 level, a difference that is not statistically significant. U.S. families have yet to recover from the recession, as incomes are still 8 percent lower than they were in 2007.
Income inequality remains near record levels in the broad measures calculated by the Census Bureau. The Gini Index, a commonly cited measure of total income concentration, remained near the record level it reached in 2012. Households in the 95th percentile of the distribution earned roughly 3.8 times as much as the median household, the highest such ratio in recent years.
Tuesday’s figures are based on pre-tax income and do not include in-kind benefits such as food stamps or rental assistance. The Census Bureau later this year will release a separate measure of poverty that does include those sources of income. Taking them into account, the increase in the poverty rate during the recession was only half as large as it appeared in the conventional measure.
The data released by the Census Bureau on Tuesday is taken from its Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, its longest-running survey. The supplement’s income data is based on interviews at about 70,000 households, and the data is adjusted to be representative of the U.S. population as a whole, excluding people in institutions or such as prisons or nursing homes.
