Providing such assistance has been the dominant strategy for combating poverty in the United States for many years. Yet it has been remarkably unsuccessful. There is no state where a welfare check will raise a four-person family above the g o v e rn m e n t ’s official poverty line ($18,104 in 2001). Add in the fact that the official poverty lineis a pretty stingy standard that has not kept pac...

Food price increases and the introduction of radical social welfare and enterprise reforms during the 1990s generated significant changes in the lives of urban households in China. During this period urban poverty increased considerably. This paper uses household level data from 1986 to 2000 to examine what determines whether households fall below the poverty line over this period and investiga...

Development organisations need easy-to-use and quick-to-implement indicators to quantify poverty when requested to measure program impact. In this paper we assess the validity of the Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI)™, a country-specific indicator based on ten closed questions on directly observable household characteristics, by its compliance to the SMART criteria. Each response receives a p...

F several decades, researchers around the world have studied demographic disparities in mortality. It is hard to know exactly how much money has been spent on this research. But certainly the amounts have run into the hundreds of million dollars. And, by and large, the conclusions of that research have been the same: The disparities have been increasing. But what if all that research was simply...

Defining poverty requires a way of distinguishing the poor from the non-poor. The usual method is to classify an individual as poor, if he or she does not meet a set of consumption norms. The poverty lines used are generally based on the cost of a fixed bundle of goods deemed necessary for subsistence mostly on nutritional grounds. The use of upper poverty line $370, gives an estimate of 1115 m...

There has been more than a decade of debate about the increase in child poverty during which the former Secretary of State, John Moore, announced 'the end of the line for poverty' (speech text 11 May 1989). Recently the National Children's Bureau has published an authoritative and well documented account commissioned by Unicef for a comparative study of child poverty in the industrialised count...

This paper explores how professionals’ universal, reductionist and standardized views of poverty differ from those of the poor themselves. Poverty line thinking concerned with income-poverty and employment thinking concerned with jobs, project Northern concerns on the South, where the realities of the poor are local, diverse, often complex and dynamic. Examples illustrate how poor people’s crit...

This article reports on a sample of 538 African American and Hispanic women who were receiving TANF in 1999, 416 of whom left the program by 2005. The Hispanic women consisted of a Mexican-origin group and a second group that was primarily Puerto Rican and Dominican. Combining the experiences of the employed and the non-employed welfare leavers, we find at best a modest decline in the average p...

One year ago, the Indian population stood at 1.027 billion, with 320 million Indian people (especially in rural areas) living below the Government of India’s official poverty line. Five hundred million people in India live on less than US$1/day, representing one third of the world’s poor people. India’s successes in poverty alleviation will seriously affect international success with internatio...

We introduce new approaches to research on poverty traps, focusing on changes in patterns of equilibria over time and across regions, applied to the Ethiopia Rural Household Survey. We revisit the incidence of multiple equilibria using new nonparametric techniques; we also emphasize conditions of single equilibria that remain stagnant below the poverty line. We identify a single equilibrium in ...