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Entrepreneurship is often seen as the cure-all solution for poverty reduction. Proponents argue that it leads to job creation, higher incomes and lower poverty rates in the cities in which it occurs. Others argue that many entrepreneurs are actually creating low-productivity firms serving local markets. Yet, despite this debate, little research has considered the impact of entrepreneurship on poverty in cities. This paper addresses this gap using a panel of US cities for the period between 2005 and 2015. We hypothesize that the impact of entrepreneurship will depend on whether it is in tradeable sectors, so likely to have positive local multiplier effects, or non-tradeable sectors, which may saturate local markets. We find that entrepreneurship in tradeables reduces poverty and increases incomes for non-entrepreneurs, a result we confirm using an instrumental variable approach, taking the inheritance of entrepreneurial traits as the instruments. In contrast, while there are some economic benefits from non-tradeable entrepreneurship, we find these are not large enough to reduce poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a comprehensive dataset on social spending covering the period 1984–2010 for developing countries, and the unique cross-country database on poverty to explore the poverty-reducing role of social protection during financial crises. The results indicate that financial crises are associated with increases in the rates of growth of the poverty headcount and the poverty gap of 12% and 7%, respectively. These detrimental poverty effects of financial crises are significantly lower in countries with higher social spending, suggesting the importance of social protection for poverty reduction in times of crisis and potential gains from policy intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International labour migration is a multidimensional process and primarily a family mechanism intended to reduce vulnerabilities associated with underlying inequalities. However, for immigrants, the break-up of physical contact with family members is an enduring feature of vulnerability in their communication with origins (often in developing countries). On the whole, family relationships are transformed: the absence of physical contact is traded-off with remittances sent home to family members. Remittances create potential for resilience by increasing human development of children, while reducing extreme poverty at the local level. Remittance flows are also an important source of foreign exchange for countries of origin. However, labour markets' polarization, backlash, and economic downturns at destinations (often in developed countries), and governments' moral hazard, currency revaluation, and production inertia at origins recreate vulnerabilities and disrupt the potential build-up of resilience. In fact, the re-creation of vulnerabilities largely outweighs the generation of resilience threads. The paper develops a typology that highlights the dynamic interaction between vulnerabilities and resilience, revealing the multiple aspects of people and remittances flows, the potential for mainstreaming migration policies into economic development, and the scale of the policy task to reduce vulnerabilities associated to international labour migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of high welfare re-entry rates has attracted great attention from economists and policymakers. Using a very rich administrative data set for the minimum income program of the Madrid Government (over 50,000 spells), this paper aims to broach various questions arising from the issue of welfare re-entry. We try to identify what factors determine observed differences in the durations of the first off-welfare spell. We analyze the combined effects of the length and type of exit of the first spell, unemployment, and sociodemographic characteristics. The experience of the first spell and, to a lesser extent, employability can contribute toward lengthening the time spent outside the program. Our results also show that off-welfare spells of households leaving the program in periods of low economic growth will be longer than those that do so during economic expansions. With the exception of unemployment effects, our estimates yield very similar results to those obtained in the U.S. studies, suggesting that U.S. welfare policies and analyses are not entirely irrelevant for European discussions of welfare policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationships among various subsets of economic development, poverty, crime, and/or income inequality have been separately investigated in several theoretical and empirical studies. However, there has been very little empirical analysis on the interdependence among all these variables in one framework. This paper examines the causality between economic development and poverty while incorporating crime and inequality. It employs a co-integration test, a 4-variable vector autoregressive (VAR) model, and a Granger test in the US over the period 1959–2001. Findings reveal a feedback loop mechanism between economic development, poverty, and crime. Interestingly, income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient has no important impact on any of the variables. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The spatial diffusion of poverty and the demographic profile of the “poor” in cities like Los Angeles, where 1.7 million residents of the greater metropolitan area qualify as such, suggest that poverty is neither a socioeconomic exception nor affiliated with a singular sociocultural or racial group. However, our policy discourse and solutions continue to suffer from a modernist/industrial era explanation of poverty and its spatial concentration. In this paper, I will offer an alternative interpretation of economic development in the 20th century and propose that development projects fit comfortably into the political philosophy of nation building and the social construction of citizenship. Under the umbrella of social justice and democracy, many regions of the world, including the inner city, have been envisioned as landscapes of social and political instability and targeted for development as such. Here, the equating of development with stability is examined theoretically to suggest that anti-poverty policies, both in the US and the UK, can be viewed as an extension of the 20th century modernist nation-building agenda. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper comments on the work of Rector et al. (1999a, 1999b). The poverty lines implicit in their restrictive material deprivation approach are disputed and the claim that America has triumphed over poverty is rejected. Evidence is presented showing that poverty among the poorest Americans has significantly increased and is now near an all time high. The long economic expansion since the recession of 1990-1991 has left hardcore poverty essentially unchanged and relative deprivation among the poorest of the poor has increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the First World countries, the industrial evolution of the developing countries is observed with concern. The are considered a strong competence in the international marked and the are held responsible for the decreasing life standard in the United States and in Europe. This is the reason to consider restrictions of the commercial relations which could limit also the Third World productivity. Paul Krugman, a professor of economics at Stanford University en Palo Alto, California, is convinced that this fear doesn't have any real base. He argues, supported by a sequence of models, which present the economic relations between the First and the Third World, that the developing countries really don't influence on the life standard or the developed countries. It shouldn't be necessary to impose import retrictions which only would hinder the economic growth of the Third World nations, and therefore the hope for a decent life standard of millions of human beings who live today in conditions of absolute poverty. Agreeing completely with the author's goals, I present here a critical discussion of the respective paper. My critics are mainly directed to the model's structure. I believe that one can use more realistic structures without modifying Krugman's final final conclusions. Some suggestions are made in this sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]