growth in social benefits reduces the overall child poverty rate however it appears to have had no significant effect on the poverty risk of families with incomes far below the poverty line such as in particularly singleparent jobless families the main reason is that the income of these families is often far below the poverty line and that the cash transfers they receive are not high enough to lift them out of poverty in addition benefits seem to have played a rather limited role in mitigating the effects of the crisis in countries where the family disposable income has declined between and