Long-Term Poverty and Disability Among Working-Age Adults

The authors use longitudinal data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation spanning 1996 to 1999 to estimate the prevalence of short- and long-term poverty among working-age people with and without disabilities. Depending on the disability measure used, annual poverty rates are 2 to 5 times higher among people with disabilities compared to those without disabilities. The relative long-term poverty rates among those with disabilities are much higher than the relative short-term poverty rates. People with disabilities represented 47% of those in poverty in 1997 according to an annual measure of poverty and 65% of those in poverty according to a long-term measure. The reasons that disability receives little attention in the poverty literature may be that most statistics are based on short-term measures, which partially mask the strong relationship between long-term poverty and long-term disability, and outdated perceptions of the relationship between disability and the ability to work.