Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Its Multiplicative Effects: The USA Experience

The implementation of state programs to support wellbeing through food subsidies aimed at maintaining a demand, addressing hunger, and reducing poverty is typical for both developed and emerging states. Their experience may be useful for Ukraine where the majority of households face a substantial overload of their budgets. A paradigm example of the public food support program is the USA Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) with a 90-years history. During the last US economic stagnation (2009) the number of program recipients increased up to 50 mln. The paper aims at summarizing the most famous in the world and one that has a long history experience in the implementation and modernization of food subsidies' programs to support families in periods of economic instability and mass impoverishment, identify pros and cons of such programs in maintaining demand and public wellbeing, identification of multiplicative social effects in the course of implementation of food support measures. The study used general and specific research methods, including system analysis, historical method, organizational and economic analysis, graphical and tabular methods, etc. The core of SNAP food subsidies is that the families with non-crossing poverty line income can receive state assistance; it is provided in cash and can be used for purchasing a specific list of products. The actualization of food subsidies in the financial crisis contributed to the renovation of food support mechanisms as the crisis led to the situation when not only illegal immigrants, homeless and unemployed people, and others but also a large number of working people in the US have fallen into the category of people suffering from food insecurity. The experience of SNAP shows that despite the abusive activity, fraud and, in some cases, inefficient spending of budget funds the multiplicative food support social effects to vulnerable people far outweigh the abovementioned problems.