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Introduction
Children living in lone parent families face a high risk of poverty across many countries (OECD, 2011). In most English-speaking nations, poor lone parent families are eligible to receive social assistance benefits and, in most instances, private transfers from the other parent, known as child maintenance or child support payments. How countries treat income derived from private child maintenance payments has important implications for the reduction of child poverty, particularly for the poorest lone parent families who receive social assistance benefits. But some countries view child maintenance as a substitute for social assistance as some, or all, of the maintenance payments are held back to reduce public expenditures. That is, when a separated parent pays private child maintenance, the lone parent family either does not receive the full amount or receives less in public social security benefits. Thus, the poverty reduction potential of child maintenance is reduced. Alternatively, some countries treat child maintenance as a complement to social assistance and pass-through the full value to eligible families without reducing social assistance payments, thereby increasing household income and enhancing child maintenance's poverty reduction potential. But, despite the importance of this issue, we currently know very little about the interactions between child maintenance and social security systems and therefore our knowledge of the relationship between child maintenance and child poverty is limited.
In this paper, we begin to explore the anti-poverty effectiveness of child maintenance by conducting new research comparing the policy approaches in the United Kingdom, United States (Wisconsin1), Australia and New Zealand. These four countries were chosen as they share a common policy ancestry having built on each other's child support policies. This provides a solid foundation for comparable analysis. However, these countries' systems are both alike and unlike in key respects and this facilitates cross-national learning to offer important policy insights.
We use a vignette technique which creates a fictitious lone parent model family, whose circumstances we vary in order to investigate the amount of child maintenance and other cash benefits the family receives. Through the vignettes, we highlight the extent to which both explicit and implicit interactions limit the anti-poverty effectiveness of child maintenance. One explicit interaction is apparent in the 'pass-through' mechanism and relates to the social...