Historical series for the Supplemental Poverty Measure that is produced using the SPM thresholds for 2012 for all years, adjusted for inflation for years prior to 2012.
Wimer et al. (2013). Data provided by the authors to the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.
The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) is a poverty rate whose computation takes into account taxes, transfers, and other factors not reflected in the Official Poverty Rate. The SPM has been computed by the U.S. Census Bureau starting in 2009; much of the data needed to produce it is not available for earlier years. Researchers from the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC) produced estimates of the SPM going back to 1967 by adjusting the 2012 SPM thresholds for inflation using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers Research Series (CPI-U-RS).
See also Supplemental Poverty Measure – Historical, which also provides estimates of the SPM that go further back in time than the Census Bureau’s official estimates, but is produced using a different methodological approach.
For more information, see the following papers: