Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Although informative and useful for comparing social groups, countries and trends over time, the poverty line does not inform us about the level of material hardship people below it encounter, whether their needs are met, or the degree of social exclusion they experience.  Scholars have argued that measures of material hardship prove better indicators of deprivation and social exclusion than income-poverty.  Measures of material hardship may also be important for policy makers because they point to specific sources of hardship (food, housing, health), and thus show where aid should be allocated and what programs should be developed.  In this study we compare income poverty and various measures of economic and emotional hardship across three groups in Israel.  We argue that subjective measures of deprivation may differ in magnitude across ethnicity even when objective measures of income-poverty are nearly identical. Furthermore, we argue that studying poverty and hardship together provides a more accurate and comprehensive portrayal of the social realities of the poor and the socioeconomically disadvantaged.

The specific types of adversity experienced by people living in poverty may differ by group membership.  This is because groups differ in living conditions, poverty histories, social networks and perceptions of needs.  Some groups may have better access than others to public resources or may typically have richer social networks that are able to provide support in times of need. Some groups may tend to have longer spells in poverty than others, some may encounter more employment difficulties than others, and some may have different needs due to different lifestyles.

To investigate this claim we focus on two equally poor groups in Israel: Israeli-Palestinians and ultra-orthodox Jews (Haredim) and compare them to non-Haredi Jews.  These two groups tend to have large families, low (though different) rates of labor-force participation, and both groups are spatially segregated.  But these groups occupy very different social locations; Haredim are part of the Jewish majority and have access to sources of political power, whereas Israeli-Palestinians suffer multiple disadvantages in Israeli society as a marginalized minority.  The groups differ also in the way their communities are organized, and have different lifestyles, values and perceptions which may be related to their experience of poverty.  For these reasons Israel is a particularly interesting case to study the intersection of poverty and group membership, and how it affects the experience of various measures of hardship.

The study draws on Israel’s 2013 Social Survey, conducted by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (n=7438).  The findings point to substantial degrees of inequality among the disadvantaged.  Although Haredim and Palestinians have similar levels of income poverty, the study shows that the consequences of poverty in terms of deprivation and hardship are more severe among Israeli-Palestinians than among (Haredi and Non-Haredi) Jews.  Israeli-Palestinians experience higher levels of material and emotional hardship than Haredim, and poor Haredim experience higher levels of hardship than poor non-Haredi Jews, on most measures.  Differences in socio-demographic characteristics, social networks and poverty history do not account for most of these differences.