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The article focuses on the conditions underlying poverty in various countries. Most of the poor people in the world are dependent on agriculture for their livelihood. The income and welfare of poor in low income countries can be improved significantly with the optimal use of the production of capacity of the land to grow enough food for the increasing population. The improvement in population quality is the deciding factor of production in improving the welfare of poor people. Agriculture poor people respond well to better opportunities to improve the production.

The substantial increase in economic inequality in favor of the upper income group in the United States and many other developed and developing nations during the past 30 years has become a major concern in public policy. Modifications of the standard measures of inequality, the Lorenz curve and Gini index, are proposed that better reflect the decline in the share of income received by the poor and middle portions of the income distribution relative to the upper end. A second pair of curves based on the fractions of either the middle or lower portion of the income curve that has the same share as the topu% and the areas between them and the line of equality are introduced. The proposed curves and related measures indicate that a noticeably greater change in the U.S. income distribution occurred during the 1967–2013 time period than are observed in the Lorenz curve and Gini index. The maximum difference between the proposed curves for the income and wealth data in the United Kingdom's 2010–2012 survey are greater than that of the Lorenz curve. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Compared with the divisive views of the past, integrative thinking has recently come to characterise the methodological debate on poverty. 'Qualitative vs quantitative' has given way to 'qual-quant'; 'cross-disciplinarity' has replaced 'economics vs anthropology'. This article attempts to review this change. It begins with a historical overview of the pure economic approach to poverty and its critique. The critique, both from within economics and from the participatory and anthropological disciplines, is examined, and recent trends are considered. The current 'qual-quant' approach is illustrated with examples, and the author concludes that the future may well see the emergence of a 'participatory qual-quant' approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The incomes of the poor may have been hurt because of adjustment costs or low-wage competition following trade deregulation and because of increased macroeconomic volatility following capital account liberalization. Greater trade volumes that disproportionately benefit low-income households in the short run, though, may offset these adverse effects. Using data from the World Bank, the IMF, and the UN, we find that capital and current account deregulation hurts the poor in the short run, and that trade offsets some of these adverse effects. Further, trade and openness have no significant impact on long-run growth, which could have offset adverse short-run effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Census Bureau has estimated the nation's annual poverty rate since 1963 using data from the Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted in March of each year. Census deems a household "poor" if annual income falls below specified income thresholds. There are two problems with this methodology. First, the Current Population Survey dramatically undercounts household economic resources. Second, the fact that household income falls below a specific level reveals little about the nature of material deprivation within the household. This paper will take an alternative approach to assessing poverty: examining the material living conditions of low-income Americans. Using data from various government surveys this paper examines ownership of property and consumer durables; housing space, and housing conditions; food and nutriment consumption; and the height, thinness and obesity of low-income persons. Finally, we attempt an overall assessment of material deprivation based on material living conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article refutes the point of view that the poor in the U.S. are victims of their own laziness, based on the data from the March 1994 Current Population Survey. Poverty was assessed by using the government's official poverty threshold, which measures whether family income is adequate for a given family size. Based on the results of the study, most of the working poor would remain poor even if they worked 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. In addition, of those who could climb out of poverty if they worked such hours, two out of five are either disabled or elderly or unable to find full-time or full-year employment. Thus it appears that most of the working poor are doing all they can to support themselves. Therefore, working more hours is not a solution to poverty, and the existence of the working poor will not disappear by inducing greater work effort. This has important policy implications, indicating a need for increasing the minimum wage, expanding income supports, such as the earned income tax credit, or instituting wage subsidies. In addition to income credits and supplements, demand-side policies are also needed to create jobs for low-skilled workers. Finally, education and training programs are needed to help these workers move into jobs that promise full-time and full-year employment and rising earnings streams.

This report employs a database developed by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan, known as the Panel Study on Income Dynamics, in an effort to analyze the decline in family incomes in the U.S. during the 1980s. The people in this panel study were drawn from two groups, one that was meant to be reflective of the population as a whole and another that oversampled the poor people population. This analysis is limited to prime-age adults, people who begin each decade between the ages of 22 and 48 and who end each decade between the ages of 32 and 58. These are the years in which people are responsible for their own well-being and in which they are most economically active. This study shows that, during a period of their lives when they are most likely to be improving their living standards, the percentage of prime-age adults losing ground increased dramatically. This is consistent with the increased inequality found in Census Bureau's Current Population Survey-based studies and with the popular perception that the 1980s were a time of great insecurity. This study also found that the pattern of family income growth was very different in the 1980s than was the experience in the 1970s.

Malaria potentially affects everyone in the tropics and sub-tropics, however, the poor and vulnerable are worse affected mainly due to the socio-economic constraints that confront them. In Ghana, the Upper West Region, which is the poorest, is one of the worse affected in terms of malaria burden. Given social and economic factors directly relate to malaria morbidity, global malaria control strategy unfortunately has not particularly targeted the effects of socio-economic deprivation on the disease morbidity and control. This study investigates the linkages between poverty and malaria morbidity using count data models, with Jirapa District in the Upper West Region of Ghana as the study area. Empirical results confirm the presence of poverty in the study area as more than half of households depend on heads whose incomes are below the poverty line of US$1 per day and that significant relationships exist between poverty and education on the one hand and malaria morbidity on the other, since gender and level of education of household head, and household poverty situation are significant determinants of malaria morbidity. The study thus recommends that policies aimed at reducing and/or eradicating malaria should include measures to increase income earning capacity of households in the study area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces a series of articles regarding the economic issues facing the U.S. in 2003. If all had been fine with the economy, president George W. Bush would not have felt the need to change his economic team only a month after the November elections. But, in fact, all is not well. After two years, unemployment levels are higher than they were at the start of the recession. Family incomes are generally down, especially for lower-income people. Young workers and African Americans are having an especially difficult time finding jobs again. But even with a new Treasury secretary and White House economic adviser, it is unlikely the Bush response will change. It is tax cuts, no matter what. In truth, in this editor's view, the economy needs some significant spending right away--ideally, by extending unemployment insurance and grants to revenues trapped state and local governments. Short-term tax cuts might also help-but not the Bush long-term cuts. Many mainstream economists were appalled by antiglobalization protests a couple of years ago, finding the protesters ignorant.

This article discusses the concept of minimum wages for the employees and highlights different views in favor and against an increase in the minimum wage. Not many economists favor increasing the minimum wage. Surely there are no economists in the free market camp who have a kind word for governmentally imposed floors on wages. The minimum wage is seen as the source of artificial distortions in the labor market that prevent resources from being directed into theft of most valuable employments. Certainly advocates of the minimum wage can take no comfort in the fact that economists have overstated the facts. Economists are uncharacteristically naive regarding the connection between government promise and performance in the case of the minimum wage. An increase in the minimum wage is government's promise that low productivity workers will receive an increase in their hourly compensation. The standard economic criticism of the minimum wage assumes that government is able to deliver on this promise. Tax system taxes monetary compensation but does not tax fringe benefits. This has motivated the substitution of fringe benefits for money wages beyond that point where pre-tax marginal values are equal.