_______________ 1 For example, states have vastly increased responsibility for welfare legislation. A key provision of the 1996 federal welfare overhaul (The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) requires each state to provide an annual current estimate of its child poverty rate by May 31st, starting in 1998. If that rate exceeds the previous year’s rate by more than ...

BACKGROUND The goal of universal health coverage (UHC) requires that families who get needed health care do not suffer financial hardship as a result. This can be measured by instances of impoverishment, when a household's consumption including out-of-pocket spending on health is more than the poverty line but its consumption, excluding out-of-pocket spending, is less than the poverty line. Thi...

Vulnerability is an important aspect of households’ experience of poverty. Many households, while not currently “in poverty” recognize that they are vulnerable to events that could easily push them into poverty — a bad harvest, a lost job, an unexpected expense, an illness, an economic downturn. Most operational measures define poverty as some function of the shortfall of current income or cons...

Poverty is the most serious threat to natural resources and the environment and most of the poor are rural-based who engage in various agricultural activities. Land is a critical asset for the rural poor and lacking means to appropriately intensify agriculture which compels the poor to either overuse or misuse this natural resource base to meet basic needs. This study presents empirical relatio...

in this paper, a method for establishing a support criterion or poverty line is developed based on engel’s law and domestic nutritional values. the support criterion is differentiated across rural and urban areas. an important result is that for 1989, people who spend less than 108,000 rials annually lie inside the poverty line in urban areas. a further important result is that food should be g...

Debates about poverty relief and foreign aid often hinge on claims about how many poor people there are in the world and what constitutes poverty. Good measures of poverty are essential for addressing the world poverty problem. Measures of poverty require a basis for determining who is poor and a method of aggregation. Historically, the methods of aggregation were quite simple. The headcount in...

Background There is high reliance on out-of-pocket (OOP) health payments as a means of financing health system in Nigeria. OOP health payments can make households face catastrophe and become impoverished. The study aims to examine the financial burden of OOP health payments among households in Nigeria.   Methods Secondary data from the Harmonized Nigeria Living Standard Survey (HNLSS) of 2009/2...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the variation in the proportion of households living below the poverty line in Brazil and the factors associated with their impoverishment. METHODS Income and expenditure data from the Household Budget Survey, which was conducted in Brazil between 2002-2003 (n = 48,470 households) and 2008-2009 (n = 55,970 households) with a national sample, were analyzed. Two cutoff poin...

We address the problem of ranking distributions of opportunity sets in terms of poverty. In order to accomplish this task, we identify a suitable notion of ‘multidimensional poverty line’ and we characterize axiomatically several poverty rankings of opportunity profiles. Among them, the Head-Count and the OpportunityGap poverty rankings, which are the natural counterparts of the most widely use...