Welfare and Employment Among Single Mothers: Israel from a Comparative Perspective

Women raising their children alone attract considerable public attention as a group, due primarily to their economic vulnerability. This comparison will focus on the demographic characteristics of single mothers, both between Israel and other countries and within each country relative to mothers in two-partner families; the study will also look at single mothers’ economic status and their degree of reliance on state assistance. The family-type comparison will facilitate an understanding of the difficulties and constraints faced by single-parent families. The inter-country comparison will shed light on the causes of this group’s poverty, the group’s economic vulnerability, and possible ways of improving its economic status.

This appears as a chapter in the Center’s annual publication State of the Nation Report – Society, Economy and Policy 2010.