Child poverty among African-Americans steady, falls for others: study

(Reuters) - More than 38 percent of African-American children live in poverty and that rate has held roughly steady since 2010, while the U.S. economy has improved and the country's overall child poverty rate fallen slightly to 20 percent, a Pew study said on Tuesday.

The Pew Research Center study, which was based on U.S. Census figures until 2013, found child poverty rates have fallen among whites, Hispanics and Asian-Americans.

African-Americans have had the highest rate of child poverty among ethnic groups in the United States since 1997 when they were about even with Hispanics, according to figures from Pew.

Twenty percent of children in the United States lived in poverty in 2013, compared with 22 percent in 2010, the study said. That improvement coincided with U.S. economic recovery since the 2007-2009 recession.

The total number of children in poverty in the country was 14.7 million in 2013.

Poverty was defined as living in a household with an annual income below $23,624 for a family of four, the Pew Research Center said.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Mohammad Zargham)