PROVIDENCE — Fighting poverty by raising wages sounds simple, until you listen to the scholarly debate.

But ask residents of Providence whether they favor a “living wage” to boost the earnings of some workers in their city, and the answer is a resounding yes, according to a recent survey conducted by researchers at Brown University.

About 70 percent of Providence residents favor paying $12.30 per hour — nearly $5 more than the state minimum wage — to workers whose companies receive contracts from the city, according to a poll of 491 residents Sept. 29-30.

The survey, based on a random sample, was conducted just before the 8th annual Thomas J. Anton/Frederick Lippitt Urban Affairs conference on “The Living Wage,” held Tuesday at Brown.

The speakers at the conference — Paul Sonn, of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University; James Sherk, of the Heritage Foundation; and Oren Levin-Waldman, of the Metropolitan College of New York — explored the economic and political forces behind the living wage and its effectiveness (or its lack of, in Sherk’s view) as a tool for improving the lives of the working poor.

In Rhode Island, 8.4 percent of the labor force — about 27,000 workers — earned between $7 and $7.99 an hour, according to the census bureau’s 2006 Current Population Survey. An additional 8,000 workers earned $6 to $6.99 per hour. (Rhode Island raised its minimum wage to $7.10 an hour, from $6.75, on March 1 last year and this year to $7.40 an hour.)

A proposed ordinance to establish a living wage in Providence, which surfaced in 1999, was debated in 2003 and again last year. In January, the Providence City Council leadership said it wanted to do a study to determine its impact on the city and possibly revise the proposed ordinance.

Sonn, a lawyer at the Brennan Center who has helped write living-wage ordinances and ballot measures for a number of cities and states, said at the conference that programs such as the earned-income tax credit and work-force education are “great but not enough” to improve the economic situation of people at the bottom of the wage scale.

Last year, states across the country, including Rhode Island, raised their minimum after years of stagnation of the federal minimum wage and the eroding effects of inflation.

Levin-Waldman, of Metropolitan College of New York, said that living-wage campaigns tend to arise in cities where there are large income disparities and where city governments have out-sourced what used to be government jobs to private contractors who pay lower wages, often with no benefits.

“Contracting out is an attempt to improve the investment climate for business” by lowering taxes, he said. “The living wage campaign, while they talk the language of justice and fairness — they’re very much a backlash of decisions made in cities” to attract development and investment.

Sherk, of the Heritage Foundation, is among the critics of the living wage, who say that raising wages simply prompts employers to “become very creative” about ways to save on labor costs, such as installing scanners in supermarkets. Employers who have to pay higher wages, he said, also tend to “hire more skilled workers.”

Creating a living wage, Sherk said, fails to address the “fundamental problem” behind low wages.

“The problem is not enough Americans have the skills to succeed,” he said. “The solution to poverty is to try to fix public education.”

Sonn said the issue is like a “three-legged stool” that includes job training, the earned-income tax credit and the minimum wage. “Over the last 35 years,” he said, “there has been no meaningful wage floor in the economy … You can’t address the problem with the other two strategies.”

The latest survey by Brown suggests that Providence residents would agree. The survey reported that 90 percent of the residents polled believe that the national minimum wage should be increased to $7.25 an hour, from $5.15, according to a summary. The survey also found that 69 percent think the government should increase cash assistance for poor people, and 83 percent responded that government should expand subsidized daycare for the poor.

(The survey has a margin of error of about plus or minus 5 percentage points.)

The poll was conducted by Darrell M. West, director the Taubman Center for Public Policy and the John Hazen White Sr. Public Opinion Laboratory, and Marion Orr, the Frederick Lippitt chair of public policy, political science and urban studies.

(The full results of the survey can be found online at www.InsidePolitics.org.)

larditi@projo.com