1. Introduction
Previous research has identified lone parents with young children (under 18 years of age) as being particularly at risk of extended low income spells and exclusion from the labour market and community life.
This study attempts to answer the following basic question: why do some lone parents escape low income or never enter spells of low income or social assistance (SA), while others remain in low income or on SA for many years?
The ultimate goal of this research is to assist HRDC to identify policies that can help lone parents overcome barriers to employment, thus preventing or alleviating low income and social exclusion.
The analysis relies on the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID). The main focus of the analysis is the first SLID panel, which followed the same respondents over the period 1993-98.
In what follows, Section 2 reviews the main findings from the literature and positions the work in this study against this literature. Section 3 describes the SLID data and basic methodological concepts. Section 4 analyzes the 1998 cross-sectional data to measure the extent of low income and to identify the main personal characteristics associated with a high incidence of low income. Section 5 probes in more detail the relative contribution of low hours of work and low hourly earnings to the incidence of low income.
Section 6 presents longitudinal measures of low income based on the 1993-98 longitudinal SLID data. Section 7 uses the same data to assess how dynamic the nature of low income is, while Section 8 estimates the length of low income spells and identifies which characteristics are associated with longer than average spells. Section 9 explores the contribution of social assistance to reducing low income, as well as the factors that contribute to prolonged reliance on social assistance. Section 10 draws together the main conclusions and outlines future research priorities.
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