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This article examines the ways in which the urban poor in Argentina help one another in the arduous task of making ends meet when neither the formal labor market nor state welfare policies are able to secure their subsistence. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the article makes one substantive, one analytic, and one theoretical claim. Substantively, the article argues by way of empirical illustration that the urban poor are hardworking bricoleurs. Analytically, the article demonstrates the advantages of studying poor people's strategies in a simultaneously historic and ethnographic fashion through joint collaborative fieldwork. Theoretically, the article pushes toward replacing the notions of 'strategy of survival or subsistence' with the more encompassing notion of 'strategy of persistence'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Redistribution is one of the fundamental characteristics of developed societies. While societal redistribution between working and non-working citizens has been studied intensively, redistribution in terms of family has been analysed mainly as private redistribution. In this contribution, we study societal redistribution in terms of family by systematically analysing its regulation and simulating its results. We map family-related redistribution in Europe by analysing to whom financial resources are granted (benefits) and from whom resources are demanded (obligations) to identify the degree and logic of family-related redistribution. We compare 68 family forms in 27 European countries based on the micro-simulation model EUROMOD. The findings show that there are clear country-clusters of redistribution in terms of family. They differ, though, as to benefits and obligations. The degree of redistribution reveals that in most countries, societal redistribution is highest towards low-income, single-parent families and lowest towards low-income family forms without children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends Wacquant’s theorization of how state institutions confine, control and punish racialized poor groups, arguing that a central modality for managing urban marginality occurs through institutional generation of and participation in spheres of informality. Focusing on Italy’s segregation of Roma in ‘neo-ghettos’, this study explores how Roma’s confinement has been produced and modulated through contradictory policies, their ambiguous implementation by meso-level actors, and Roma’s micro-level navigation of ensuing arrangements. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Rome, it traces how ambivalent formalization drives have bifurcated the city’s very diverse Roma populations into two main sociospatial configurations, surveillance-intensive ‘villages’ and unauthorized micro-encampments, producing intertwined informalities in housing and employment that reinforce power inequalities despite Roma’s attempts to exert some agency and autonomy through building social capital within and beyond their communities. Variable informalities thus emerge as a core dimension through which resources and constraints are selectively apportioned as techniques of governmentality implemented by different institutions and actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A plausible answer to the question of why poor people stay poor reads that privileged people make or keep them poor. Dependency theories seem to derive their popularity among sociologists and political scientists from containing this answer. While this basic insight might be true to some extent, dependency theories still might be false as accumulating anomalies suggest. The rent-seeking approach offers a competing paradigm according to which price distortions within LDCs and between LDCs and industrialised societies contribute to the preservation of poverty. In contrast to dependency theory, the rent-seeking approach is fully compatible with neo- classical micro-economic theory. While a review of cross-national studies serves to call dependency theories into question, it cannot yet provide much support for a rent- seeking approach. There are simply not enough studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cole WM (2018) Poor and powerless: Economic and political inequality in cross-national perspective, 1981–2011. International Sociology. DOI: 10.1177/0268580918760430First published 7th March 2018.The author would like to draw attention to the following correction in the above article. The reference:Coppedge M, Gerring J, Lindberg S (2017) V-Dem methodology, version 7.1. Available at: www.v-dem.net/media/filer%5fpublic/f2/82/f282f504-c3c8–4fff-8277-e9fda9d54934/methodology%5fv71.pdf (accessed 3 January 2018).Should have stated:Coppedge M, Gerring J, Lindberg SI, et al. (2017) V-Dem Methodology v7.1 Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers. cfm?abstract_id=2968284 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]