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Immigrant and native child poverty in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden 1993–2001 is studied using large sets of panel data. While native children face yearly poverty risks of less than 10 percent in all three countries and for all years studied the increasing proportion of immigrant children with an origin in middle- and low-income countries have poverty risks that vary from 38 up to as much as 58 percent. At the end of the observation period, one third of the poor children in Norway and as high as about a half in Denmark and in Sweden are of immigrant origin. The strong overrepresentation of immigrant children from low- and middle-income countries when measured in yearly data is also found when applying a longer accounting period for poverty measurement. We find that child poverty rates are generally high shortly after arrival to the new country and typically decrease with years since immigration. Multivariate analysis shows that parents years since immigration and education affect risks of the number of periods in persistent poverty. While a native child is very unlikely to spend nine years in poverty, the corresponding risk for a child to a newly arrived immigrant was found to be far from negligible. Much of the pattern is similar across the three countries but there are also some notable differences.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the issue of social assistance receipt among immigrants to Sweden and compare to receipt by natives.

The paper describes the institutional background, reports statistical information and surveys the literature on the immigrant‐native disparity in social assistance receipt.

Most out‐payment for social assistance in Sweden refers to foreign‐born persons, a category comprising 14 percent of the population. Immigrants tend to assimilate out of social assistance receipt. However, receipt continues to be higher many years after immigration among immigrants from non‐rich countries than for natives with several identical characteristics. The elevated probabilities of social assistance receipt among immigrants from non‐rich countries are interpreted to be mainly due to failed integration into the labor market at the destination.

Policies for integrating immigrants into the labor market are also policies for reducing social assistance receipt among immigrants and reducing immigrant‐native social assistance disparity. However, other factors such as the structure of Swedish welfare policy play a role as well.

This is the first survey of the literature on disparities in social assistance receipt between immigrants and natives in Sweden.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate rural people's perception of income adequacy in order to understand how it is affected by income in the county where the respondent lives, age of household members, as well as number of household members. The paper also aims to find out how poverty lines and poverty counts derived from people's perception relate to what has been previously reported.

The Subjective Poverty Line (SPL) methodology is modified by asking one question on the amount of grains necessary for the respondent's household and another on the amount of cash necessary. Information was obtained from a large survey covering 22 provinces in 2003 and analysed using regressions analysis.

People in high‐income counties perceive that more cash, but not grains are needed than those living in low‐income counties. Respondents perceive that economies of scale exist in amounts of cash needed for a household. They also perceive that young children need less grain than adults and that a schoolchild incurs higher money expenditures than an adult. A poverty line for rural China derived by the SPL methodology is higher than the low income line used by the National Bureau of Statistics for 2002. However, a poverty count based on the SPL methodology is similar to what has been reported.

The findings suggest that poverty lines for rural China preferably should consider not only spatial differences in cost of living but also the number of household members in a non‐linear way.

The paper describes the first application of the SPL approach to rural China.

This article estimates a control function estimator with training effect modelled as a random coefficient, partitioned into an observed and unobserved component. The article analyzes the earnings effect of participating in labor market training programs for three cohorts during the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. It separates the analysis between Swedish and foreign‐born to identify differences in their responses to training. The results indicate that there is positive sorting in training: slightly positive effects for both groups but somewhat larger for the foreign‐born. Further, consistent with results from several previous studies, the article finds that being young often means no positive pay‐off from training, and the same is found for persons with only a primary education. In conflict with earlier studies, the article finds that males have a better pay‐off from training than females. Rewards from training are higher for foreign‐ than for native‐born and rewards among the former vary by place of birth and how long they have been in the country.