Families living in poverty increased last year

from The Taipei Times

By Max Hirsch

The number of families living below the poverty line nationwide has skyrocketed to nearly 90,000, a new high since 1981 when figures were first compiled, the Ministry of the Interior said.

This year's figure of 86,700 low-income households nationwide marks a 4.29 percent increase in the number of poor families over 2005, the ministry said in a press release yesterday.

The 86,700 low-income households were home to 211,975 people, the release added.

The ministry's Department of Social Affairs spokesman Chen Chi-hsun (陳其勛) said in a telephone interview yesterday that the poverty line is defined as 60 percent of the average national monthly expenditure per family recorded in the previous year, with some qualifications factored in relating to ownership of personal assets and real estate.

The department cited two main factors for the increase.

"A natural increase and amendments to the Social Service and Rescue Law [社會救助法] are behind the changes," the release said. "The natural increase refers to the increase in the cost of living, which naturally drives up the number of low-income households."

The statement added that recent amendments to the Social Service and Rescue Law relaxed restrictions regarding the cut-off criteria in determining which families are living below the poverty line.

That is, the ministry is counting more households as "low-income" in order to make them eligible for government assistance, Chen said.

According to the ministry, the criteria for making such determinations is more liberal than in previous years, with "cross-border, single-parent, Aboriginal, elderly and other households that are often hard to define as living above or below the poverty level" receiving more help from the government in recent years.

Statistics released by the ministry suggested that the ranks of the poor are increasing in both rural and urban communities, with the highest number of impoverished people residing in Taitung County.

A total of 101,300 of the county's 230,000 registered residents live below the poverty line whereas in Taipei County, long considered the nation's most developed region, the number of families living below the poverty line has increased by 10 percent per year, with 10,963 families of the total 26,896 considered to be low-income.

The number of poor families there increased to 3,310 last year from 2,700 in 2005, it added, citing credit card debt and unemployment as chief factors for the rise.

The release added that, with a 20 percent yearly increase in the number of low-income families, Kao-hsiung County is home to the highest increase in such households.