ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the effects of household fragmentation in terms of poverty, inequality and welfare. The changes in the level and distribution of child poverty reflect the ways in which lone parents have been the focus of subsidy levels unavailable or inaccessible to couples when, for obvious reasons, it takes more income to push two adults over the poverty threshold than one. Single, childless people have twice the risk of poverty compared with childless couples, just as lone pensioners have a higher risk than couple pensioners, and make up around a third or more of working-age adults deemed to be in poverty. Simultaneous rises in both no-worker and two-worker households both widen the income distribution and cause poverty to rise with overall income. Income inequality may be more pronounced by age and sex in East Asia than it is in Western countries, but inequalities vanish when comparisons are made on a household rather than an individual level.
