If the term poverty it taken to mean human needs that are not met, then most of the estimates for the scale of urban poverty in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean appear too low. World Bank estimates for 1988 suggested that there were 330 million "poor" people living in urban areas (World Bank 1991) which implied that more than three-quarters of the urban population in low and middle...

between 1970 and 1990, the number of people in the United States living in high-poverty census tracts (with poverty rates of 40 percent or more) nearly doubled, from 4.1 to 8.0 million. Children who live in poor urban neighborhoods are disproportionately likely to be members of racial and ethnic minority groups and are also at greater risk for school failure. For example, only 11 percent of fou...

Social Assistance Receipt and its Importance for Combating Poverty in Urban China Since the second half of the 1990s economic restructuring in urban China has led to widespread joblessness and income insecurity. The rapid expansion of the system of social assistance, Di Bao, can be understood from this perspective. Using a survey covering large parts of urban China in 2002, we investigate facto...

Regime theory, the dominant paradigm in the study of urban politics, maintains that cities are governed by informal arrangements consisting of public and private sector elites. Because economic growth is the main policy objective of regimes, research has tended to focus on mayoral coalition building and development policy. Thus much less attention has been paid to policies that more directly im...

The increased visibility of concentrated urban poverty has posed a variety of intellectual and policy challenges in the past decade. The spread of joblessness and economic disinvestment has left many urban neighborhoods in ruins. Fears about the culture and family life of the poor have motivated a variety of responses, including the recent “welfare reform” effort that ended the federal governme...

This paper uses longitudinal data from two informal settlements of Nairobi, Kenya to examine patterns of child growth and how these are affected by four different dimensions of poverty at the household level namely, expenditures poverty, assets poverty, food poverty, and subjective poverty. The descriptive results show a grim picture, with the prevalence of overall stunting reaching nearly 60% ...

In this paper, we evaluate absolute consumption poverty and inequality in rural and urban Burundi after more than 5 years of civil war. Using the cost of basic needs method, we find a poverty incidence of 71.5% in rural areas and 36.5% in Bujumbura, and a Gini-coefficient of inequality of respectively 34.9 and 44.5%. In analysing the main correlates and determinants of rural poverty, we identif...

This paper reviews trends in poverty since the late 1960s. Poverty is as prevalent now as it was then. A good deal about the nature of poverty and our efforts to deal with it, however, has changed. The paper has three major themes. First, we note that urban poverty is no longer a predominantly black issue; the composition of the urban poor has changed considerably since the late 1960s. Second, ...