A University of Michigan study-the first to compare rates at which people escape from poverty in the United States and eight other Western, industrialized nations-shatters the myth that America offers the brightest hope to those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Low-income families with children in Europe and Canada are just as likely as their U.S. counterparts to escape from poverty and much less likely to be poverty-stricken in the first place, according to the study by Greg Duncan, professor of economics, and other researchers in the Institute for Social Research. Their findings were published in the August 1994 issue of the Journal of Population Economics. The study used data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for the United States, an annual survey by UM's Survey Research Center.

The results of the comparative study make it clear that the most important difference between poverty in the United States and in the other Western nations studied is that poverty in the United States is more prevalent and more severe. U.S. poverty was compared with that in Canada, France, Germany, Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

The policy implications of this finding are significant, according to Duncan. "The belief that generous social assistance programs are a key impediment to economic mobility is not supported by these data," he says.

"We've known for almost twenty years now that a substantial proportion of American poor escape from poverty," says Duncan. "What is surprising is that there is so much mobility in tradition-bound, class-conscious, welfare-state European countries."

Support for the research was provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and European Science Foundation.