Public Transfers, Equivalence Scales and Poverty in Canada and the United States.

The evaluation of the impact on poverty of social programs depends on how other programs are treated in the analysis and on the assumptions used for estimating poverty measures. This paper applies a simple yet sound method for allocating between various programs the total poverty reduction obtained from several programs. Estimates of program impacts are also provided for a range of equivalence scales, poverty measures, and poverty lines in both Canada and the United States.