The country is slowly emerging from the Great Recession, the longest period of economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. As unemployment rates have risen, poverty also has risen. More than one in five children were poor in 2009, according to data released by the Census Bureau in September.
How much higher will child poverty be in 2010? Poverty statistics will not be released until next September, but many policy-makers and child advocates would like to have a sense of the child poverty rate now. Moreover they would like to know it not just nationally but also for their own state. A new issue brief by Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution attempts to meet this need by providing predictions of child poverty, by state, ten months before the actual statistics will be released.