For the past eleven years, the Wisconsin Poverty Project has addressed the question of whether families in the state have the income necessary to meet their basic needs. This year’s report, co-authored by AAPSS Fellow Timothy Smeeding and released in June, shows that poverty rates in Wisconsin have stagnated despite rising wages.
Developed by researchers at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison to infuse public policy with research findings, the annual report uses three different measures to estimate poverty in Wisconsin from 2008 to 2017: the market income poverty measure, which is based on private income only; the Census Bureau’s official poverty measure, which also includes the value of public cash benefits; and the Wisconsin Poverty Measure, which takes into account not only cash benefits but also noncash benefits and taxes.
The report aims to inform policy with up-to-date and place-specific data that go beyond the official poverty statistics for Wisconsin and serve as a model for other states for crafting more meaningful measures of poverty.
