The Atlantic
Low wages benefit employers at the expense of both workers and taxpayers.
January 14, 2021
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The country’s very low minimum wage comes at a high cost. And for taxpayers, it adds up to more than $100 billion a year.
That number comes from a new analysis of safety-net usage by Ken Jacobs, Ian Eve Perry, and Jenifer MacGillvary of UC Berkeley’s Labor Center. It identifies working families with at least one member who would get a raise if the federal minimum wage were lifted to $15 an hour, and finds that the government spends about $107 billion a year on Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), cash welfare, food stamps, and the earned-income tax credit for those families.
Innocenti Research Brief: Child Marriage and Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program Analysis of protective pathways in the Amhara region – Summary of report findings
Format
Emerging evidence suggests that social protection programmes can have a positive role in delaying marriage for girls. But the pathways and design features by which programmes may influence child marriage outcomes remain unknown. This mixed-methods study explores whether and how the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) in Ethiopia, given its national reach and potential to address poverty, can also affect child marriage practice. It draws on descriptive quantitative and qualitative data from an ongoing impact evaluation of the Integrated Safety Net Program (ISNP) pilot in the Amhara region.