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This paper investigates cultural dimensions and processes of exclusion in rural Ireland and Russia that impact upon marginalised rural people by making them poor. It employs Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1977) concept of cultural capital, which provides understanding of both structural effects of cultural discrimination and individual strategies of cultural reproduction on well-being. First, it explores the function of cultural capital as a power resource that can be used to monopolise certain cultural preferences. Second, the paper studies the function of cultural capital to mark cultural distance and to put people with less-valued cultural resources in a disadvantaged position that can limit poor people’s access to social settings and resources. Third, the paper investigates the function of cultural capital to exclude individuals by means of regulating their aspirations and cultural dispositions, which degrade social bonds and limit people’s sources of economic growth. The results of this study reveal the complexity of classificatory effects of cultural practices on poverty and argue against treating culture as a residual category in poverty studies. It takes on board the findings from this study to critically re-evaluate certain stereotypes of hardship and to articulate the need for a broader understanding of rural poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who benefits from economic growth? This paper analyses the distributional impact of different types of growth within a two-sector model. The paper first presents necessary and sufficient conditions for unambiguous changes in wage inequality in a dual economy, based on analysis of the entire Lorenz curve. These conditions are then applied to the Harris–Todaro model with an urban non-agricultural sector and rural agriculture. It is shown that capital accumulation or technical progress in agriculture can shift the Lorenz curve inwards and reduce wage inequality, while the effects of development in non-agriculture are typically ambiguous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Papers in Regional Science is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper analyses the impact of the economic growth in Cote d'Ivoire on the poor people. We use household data from two LSMS (1992 and 2002) led by the National Statistical Office of Côte d'Ivoire. We show that the situation in this country is characterized by a trickle-down growth: the poverty growth curve and the growth incidence curve computed show that growth reduces poverty but the poor people receive proportionally fewer benefits than the non-poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates that recent protests in Bolivia must be linked to the failure of efforts to improve democratic participation in the country. It argues that such failures can be traced to a history of prejudices in national development and society and persistent biases and contradictions within international development policy and institutions. Despite these obstacles, the paper concludes that ideas for appropriate development and realistic alternatives for change to government and democracy are visible in recent critical development thinking and amongst the different social and cultural groupings involved in the demonstrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are the independent economic activities of poor people “petty commodity production”—an informal way to earn a subsistence wage? Or are they “microentrepreneurship”, a launching point for capital accumulation and growth? This paper draws on fieldwork in Bolivia, Peru and Guatemala, focusing specifically on the poorest businesses. In–depth interviews indicate that even the smallest–scale producers, merchants and service providers have goals of “improving” their business and “growing” their capital, not unlike their capitalist counterparts. Yet, while growth is desirable, maintaining one’s business as a steady source of income is a sufficient achievement for many. Poor self–employed people are both “labourers” and “entrepreneurs”; the key macro–level question becomes, not “Do petty–commodity producers have different goals than capitalist entrepreneurs”, but “What resources are lacking, and what obstacles exist, that keep many microentrepreneurs in low–yield activities, with little opportunity to grow their resources?”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses central issues related to population policy and economic development. Poverty and prosperity are normally marked by boundaries. These boundaries are also the borders of countries. The familiar exchange-rate comparisons of per capita incomes often overstate international differences in standards of living, but even the best available purchasing-power-parity statistics give the richest countries per capita incomes 10 and 20 times as great as the poorest countries. The statistics also suggest that migrants from poor to rich countries normally obtain great increases in wage rates, and the persistence of the migration confirms that these increases are not statistical illusions. It was shown in this paper that the coincidences of the demarcations of poverty and prosperity with national borders, and the experiences of migrants crossing these borders, offer insights for both economists and demographers, and indeed for anyone who is anxious to alleviate poverty and hasten the progress of the less developed countries. A fresh perspective on the population problem can be achieved and even begin to uncover the key to economic development, by asking how well migration and the great differences in per capita incomes across countries are explained by diminishing returns.

Several governmental programs attempt to relieve economic stress for given segments of the population. Their success is often contingent upon how accurately economic distress in given areas can be identified and measured. The indicator most commonly used is the poverty rate or a related measure, such as the proportion of persons with incomes below 150% of the designated poverty threshold. However, these poverty thresholds are determined nationally and thus fail to take account of local income levels or variations in living costs. Nationally determined poverty thresholds obscure the existence of economic distress in affluent areas. This paper explores an alternate methodology that relates household income at the census tract level to county median household income in order to identify areas of significant poverty. The findings are then compared with official poverty statistics. The analysts is performed for Nassau and Suffolk Counties, two affluent suburban counties located on long Island, adjacent to New York City. The data used came from the 1990 decennial census. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The MDG employment indicators suffer from major shortcomings, including measurement problems, inappropriate use of aggregate statistics, ambiguous interpretability, and assumptions that do not apply to developing countries. Based on this critique, the authors propose a new set of four indicators for productive employment and decent work, namely: the growth of labour value added per worker, the working poverty rate, the share of workers receiving less than an absolute minimum labour income, and the share of workers receiving less than 60 per cent of the median labour income. They demonstrate the empirical application of these indicators using the country cases of Uganda and Peru. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Output growth volatility has negative effects on growth, poverty and welfare. The empirical literature has therefore searched for country-specific factors affecting volatility and focused on financial development, policy distortions, trade and financial openness. Using the same empirical framework, we focus on migrants' remittances that can help to reduce output growth volatility thanks to their size, stability and low procyclicality. In a cross-section of about 60 emerging and developing economies over the period 1980-2003, we show that indeed remittances are negatively correlated to output growth volatility. Instrumental variable estimation suggests that the effect of remittances is of a causal nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current growth literature does not explain the inability of poor countries to utilize existing knowledge. This study presents a stylized development model based on firms' expansion through on-the-job training. Since trained workers can supervise and train more workers, a development process in which output and productivity increase up to a full utilization of existing technology is generated. Unlike schooling-based models, which require an assumption regarding a smaller local stock of knowledge, this study relies on the size of the industrial sector and the limited supply of training opportunities, therefore highlights barriers to development, even when technology and capital are available. ( JEL O1, O4, J2) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the empirical foundation of macroeconomic conservatism is fragile and that the intellectual momentum exists to develop a viable alternative to current orthodoxy. This would entail a renewed commitment to employment creation as a core goal of macroeconomic policy and creating fiscal space to sustain investments in infrastructure and human development. It would also entail an emphasis on comprehensive social protection to deal with economic insecurity engendered by macroeconomic volatility.

Discusses a pro-poor growth strategy in which the income of the poor grew at an above average rate and the real food prices declined. Focus of the strategy on investing in the human capital of the poor and on agricultural research and development; Role of agricultural growth; Role for specific intervention programs in accelerating the reduction of chronic poverty.

In most empirical work, the investigator's understanding of the economic process under study is only minimally reflected in the econometric methodology. This paper suggests that in many cases, the construction of a small-scale simulation can "prepare" the data for regression in a manner which takes cognizance of the theory of the process. Regression is then used to scale the output of the simulation up to observed magnitudes of the variable to be predicted. The simulation has the function of exploring for the nature of the non-linearities and interactions and thus replaces the usual search for a form which maximizes R². The simulation may also be helpful where colinear data are a problem. An example is presented in which the effects of wages, unemployment rates, and labor turnover on poverty are studied through a "prepared" regression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work (Smiley, 1995) attributed failure of development efforts to the injection of aid into societies where landed institutions may absorb this aid, block growth and maintain inequality An interactive simulation model was built (Smiley, 1996) to explore the effects of land rent flows under alternative transition strategies In these simulations, the public collection of land rent was found to be superior to all other third world development and reformist strategies in achieving growth with equity The underlying ethical and economic arguments are here examined in more general classes of transitions economic transitions involving industrial and post-industrial societies, political transitions involving territorial conflict, and environmental transitions involving adverse externalities. Recommendations are made for collective action to improve both efficiency and equity outcomes from these transitions [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although they are leading institutions in the world of modern development finance, the multilateral development banks have not been very explicit in outlining the development theories upon which they base their loan operations. This paper assesses the utility of the three prime theories employed by these institutions: the project approach, the macroeconomic (gap theory) approach, and the social welfare (or income distribution) approach. It indicates the questions to which each approach addresses itself, and it indicates weaknesses and theoretical inadequacies of each as a primary or sole development tool. Only a balanced and careful use of all these sometimes contradictory approaches will permit the multilateral lending institutions to fulfill their multifaceted obligations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using novel state‐level data of Peru from 1997 to 2010, we investigate how growth in different sectors affects poverty rates and the middle class. Our results indicate that only the manufacturing sector seems to robustly decrease poverty. Growth in the service sector emerges as a meaningful predictor of a rising middle class. Allowing for regional differences, we find substantial variation across the 25 Peruvian states with large shifts in magnitudes, signs, and statistical importance. Beyond the immediate implications for Peru, these findings highlight the importance of analyzing the link between economic performance and poverty rates on a subnational level. Policy implications are likely to differ substantially, depending on the source of economic growth and regional particularities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In academic economics, inequality has received little attention in recent decades, although popular concerns about the super-rich have grown. The World Top Incomes Database provides evidence of the rise of the super-rich in many countries since 1980. Thomas Piketty has publicised the new data, predicting increases in inequality due to the return to capital exceeding the rate of economic growth and advocating policies to counter such increases by high taxes on the income and wealth of the super-rich. This article asks why inequality has been a neglected topic, assesses empirical contributions and Piketty' s model and discusses implications for evidence-based policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid population ageing and economic transformation in Asia underline the policy challenges associated with ensuring income security in old age. This article examines the potential role of social pensions in securing old-age income security in Asia. It assesses the main policy trade-offs associated with adopting alternative social pension designs, especially around two critical policy points: the comparative advantages of social assistance and social pensions; and the integration of non-contributory transfers within advanced contributory pension schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The published literature leads the reader to expect polarization between conservation and development communities as to the relationship between biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation. A survey of over 1,000 conservation and development professionals does not, however, support this depiction. Indeed it reveals a surprising consensus of opinion that there is a positive link between biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation. Where there is some division, is over the direction of that link-conservation as a means to poverty alleviation, or poverty alleviation as a means to conservation-but again conservation and development organizations appear equally divided in their views. Extreme positions often dominate policy debates, hindering progress towards effective, integrated approaches. Our analysis indicates that this may be true of the conservation-poverty debate. Debate is needed not on whether conservation and poverty are linked and whose role it is to address each agenda but on how to develop conservation and development programmes that find integrated solutions to shared challenges. This could greatly inform the process of revising national biodiversity strategies that has recently been started by Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and which potentially present a real opportunity for linking conservation and development in policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a comprehensive approach for analyzing the evolution of poverty using Mozambique as a case study. Bringing together data from disparate sources, we develop a novel “back-casting” framework that links a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to a micro-simulation poverty module. This framework provides a new approach to explaining and decomposing the evolution of poverty, as well as to examining rigorously the coherence between poverty, economic growth, and inequality outcomes. Finally, various simple but useful and rarely-applied approaches to considering regional changes in poverty rates are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widespread trade liberalization and economic integration characterize the current era of globalization. While this approach has resulted in significant job creation, improved living standards, and a wider variety of cheaper consumer goods and services, opponents question if globalization's benefits outweigh the dislocations and downsides that it causes. Protestors are intent on stalling or rolling back globalization's progression and our review of the history of globalization reveals that a backlash is not without precedent. The article carefully examines the myth and reality of these two opposing positions on four key areas of the globalization debate: jobs; inequality and poverty; national sovereignty and cultural diversity; and the natural environment. This information is then utilized to derive a broad set of feasible policy recommendations that could help bring about a more sustainable form of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns over rising college tuition and slow economic growth have brought renewed attention to the role of federal and state financial aid programs in opening access to education. Despite a large body of literature examining the effects of grant aid on four‐year and public two‐year college enrollment, for‐profit colleges—particularly the vast majority that offer two‐year degrees and certificates—have largely been ignored. Using panel data methods and a new administrative data set of for‐profit colleges operating in California between 1989 and 2003, I assess the impact of the federal Pell Grant program, the G.I. Bill, and California's Cal Grant program on the net number of for‐profit colleges per county. The results suggest that for both Pell and Cal Grants, increases in the per‐student maximum award encourage for‐profit entry. This relationship is particularly strong in counties with high adult poverty levels, where more students are eligible for aid. Further, these gains in the private sector do not appear to come at the expense of the public sector. Rather, public community colleges also experience enrollment gains as the generosity of Pell and Cal Grants increases, although this reaction appears to be weaker than the reaction of for‐profits. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examines the extent to which income distribution affects the ability of economic growth to reduce poverty, based on 1990s data for a sample of rural and urban sectors of African economies. Using the basic-needs approach, an analysis-of-covariance model is derived and estimated, with the headcount, gap, and squared gap poverty ratios serving as the respective dependent variables, and the Gini coefficient and PPP-adjusted incomes as explanatory variables. The study finds that the responsiveness of poverty to income growth is a decreasing function of inequality, albeit at varying rates for the three poverty measures: lowest for the headcount, followed by the gap and fastest for the squared gap. The ranges for the income elasticity in the sample are estimated at: 0.02–0.68, 0.11–1.05, and 0.10–1.35, respectively, for these poverty measures. Furthermore while, on average, the responsiveness of poverty to income growth appears to be the same between the rural and urban sectors, there are substantial sectoral differences across countries. The results suggest the need for country-specific emphases on growth relative to inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses on the measure used to gauge poverty in the U.S., Europe and other developing countries. It discusses that the present official measure of poverty in the U.S. is flawed and both, the poverty threshold and measurement of available resources should be improved. It reports that European countries provided with sufficient social aid but they face a technical problem of relative poverty threshold. Also mentioned are the levels of economic development in developing and underdeveloped countries.

The article focuses on the association between weather risk and poverty as well as the significance of weather index insurance for agricultural and rural areas in lower-income countries in the U.S. Uninsured weather risks tend to contribute to the existence of chronic poverty, though health problems are often considered as the greatest risk encountered by many rural households. The risk of extreme weather events contributes to the existence of chronic poverty. It was concluded that the effective mechanisms transferring risk can catalyze investment and economic growth, lessening poverty in rural areas of lower income countries.

This article has two goals: (i) to reduce the 7-fold productivity differential required to explain the observed 33-fold income difference between the richest and poorest countries of the world; and (ii) to explain cross-country differences in the capital-output ratio. To achieve the first goal we modify the production function of the standard neoclassical growth model to include public capital whose provision is subject to intermediation costs. For the second goal we distort private investment by introducing credit frictions. The model, quantified using cross-country data, generates an income gap of 33 with productivity differences of only 3 under the measured variations in public and private capital. The required productivity gap declines even further, to 2.1, when we introduce a home-production sector. On the second goal, however, credit frictions do a poor job of explaining cross-country variations in the capital-output ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the availability of effective, affordable interventions for the most common causes of death, more than ten million children in developing countries die each year. This article describes the circumstances of four countries whose reductions in child mortality exceeded what might be expected from their poor economic circumstances, and it asks whether they followed common routes to improved health for children. The findings suggest that contextual factors, such as the degree of economic development, good governance, and strong health care systems, matter less than do targeted health intervention, foreign aid, and technical assistance. In general, these findings contradict prevailing U.S. foreign policy regarding the circumstances in which progress toward health goals can be made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trade is the engine of development. The biggest thing the developed world can do to alleviate poverty is remove trade barriers. The benefits of that are infinitely better than direct aid. It is trade, not aid, that holds the key to creating jobs and raising incomes. ...we are very clear that it is through trade, much more than through aid, that we can enable the poorest people in the poorest countries of our world to start that journey of modernization, of economic reform—a pathway out of poverty and into prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the implications of globalization for income inequality. Income inequality refers to the degree of dissimilarity of the incomes within a certain chosen unit, such as region, country or the globe. It describes how highly households' or groups' incomes deviate from average income in an income distribution. Most economists see economic growth as a prime move in decreasing poverty and equally distributing the benefits from growth as the cure for inequality. If countries are taken as the unit of analysis, the inequality literature can be split into within-country inequality, between-country equality and global inequality. Motivated by the Solow-Swan growth model and its implications for absolute convergence, researchers, for some time, looked at per capita income differences between countries to approximate world inequality. There are two methodological approaches to measuring global inequality. In the first approach, the whole world is considered like a country and income of each household is counted towards measuring world inequality. The second approach approximates world inequality by taking into account per capita gross domestic products of the countries, between-country income distributions, countries' populations and their within-country income distributions.

The article focuses on the effects of economic growth on the distribution of income. Henry George and Alfred Marshall were among the most influential authors of the late 19th century. George's best-selling "Progress and Poverty" fueled many policy debates of the time; and Marshall's "Principles of Economics," the standard textbook for decades, laid the foundation for modern economics. Each recognized the other's influence. Not only were George and Marshall important figures in intellectual his tow, but they had an important common ground in their deep concern with poverty. Both considered poverty mentally and morally debasing in large part because of its general association with relentlessly hard manual labor. George and Marshall both believe that aided by a proper set of policies, progress can eliminate poverty. With a tax that appropriates rent from the unimproved value of land, George sweeps away all other taxes, all unearned and undeserved private income, poverty, greed, and only one aspect of private land ownership-its entitlement to residual income. With more public education and a higher sense of duty, Marshall's tamed competition gradually eliminates poverty and its attendant evils.

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article presents information on Hong Kong and Singapore. There are many similarities between Hong Kong and Singapore. They have both enjoyed high rates of economic growth over the past three decades, averaging six percent a year in real terms. The two have become known as "East Asian Tigers," having made the transition from poverty to newly industrialized economies in a relatively short time. Both started off as British colonies, with British legal and administrative systems, and made their living as trading ports serving their respective regions. Singapore has been an independent republic since 1965, Hong Kong was returned to China on July 1, 1997. Hong Kong and Singapore are both densely populated cities. Hong Kong and Singapore capture economic rent primarily by nationalizing land and leasing it out. In 1998, Hong Kong's land area of 1,095 square kilometers and her population of 6.6 million were both approximately twice those of Singapore. Owing to historical reasons, Hong Kong's land- tenure arrangements produce an effect comparable to that of straightforward land-value taxation.

This article compares income distribution and economic progress to neo-classical and neo-Keynesian schools. It aims to determine empirically whether there is a strong relationship between income distribution and economic progress. Its first section briefly examines the economic theories on the relationship between income inequality and economic progress within the framework of institutional economics. The second section contains the empirical analysis of the hypothesized relationship which involves construction of a model, description of the variables and data, and interpretation of the estimated results. A cross- national study with a sample of 65 countries is carried out. In the final section, conclusions and suggestions for further study are made. The analysis of income distribution and economic progress (or growth) in the past was largely dominated by the conventional approaches such as neo-classical and neo-Keynesian schools. However, institutionalism offers an alternative explanation, particularly on the relationship between income distribution and economic growth.

Henry George delivered his famous "Moses" lecture in 1878, just one year prior to the publication of his masterwork, Progress and Poverty. The many parallels in the thinking of both George and Moses suggest that George may have been greatly inspired by Moses. George appreciated Moses' concern with improving this world rather than the hereafter Moses, like George, advocated a minimum role for government. Moses proposed a thoroughly equitable distribution of the land which would generate fair taxes and avoid the exploitation so denounced by George. Land accumulation by the few would be prevented by requiring the return of ownership to the original owners every fifty years. George, the humanitarian, is also sympathetic with Mosaic reforms restoring human dignity such as the cancellation of oppressive debt every seventh year, and relief from drudgery every sabbath day and sabbatical year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henry George's Progress and Poverty, published a century ago, laid the foundation for a theory that attracted a worldwide following. He emphasized that political economy investigates the way a community produces wealth and the proportions in which that wealth will be distributed between individuals. In our day that has been called `plutology,' a subdiscipline of political economy. Many of George's critics, then and now, act as apologists of the status quo, in society and in the academy. But the science's purview must be broader than plutology. Economics, to be relevant, must be useful in the solution of economic and social problems. In redirecting economists to their basic responsibility, George made a lasting contribution to economic science. He also was a perennial influence on economic scholars, even on some of his most antagonistic critics. But George is neglected because his doctrines were and are a threat to various establishments. However, by force of logic and through clarity of expression, he is a goad to the consciences of all folk of good will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This investigation of American Indian .underdevelopment is based on historical data on the Cherokee people which demonstrate how a self-sufficient people have been reduced to their present state of poverty and welfare dependence. Colonialism and the imposition of White control over Native institutions undermined the Cherokees' ability to innovate effectively. This hypothesis is substantiated by similar experiences of other tribes, as well as those of different indigenous groups, such as Alaska Natives, who have been more successful in preserving their traditional cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on anti-poverty policy. With respect to anti-poverty policy, two major positions have emerged-one emphasizing a structural approach, the other an aggregative approach. These positions are not mutually exclusive, their difference being a question of relative emphasis. Both hold that there is some link between the rate of economic growth and the rate at which poverty incidence is reduced. The essential point of departure between the two points of view lies with the strength of this linkage: the structural position holding that, although economic growth opens up possibilities to escape poverty, a substantial proportion of the poor are not able to exploit these opportunities and are thus left behind in a poverty backwash. In short, the crucial distinction between the two theses is disagreement over the effect of economic growth in reducing poverty incidence. The higher levels of poverty incidence among minority families indicates, of course, that family poverty is relatively more concentrated among these groups and is what one would expect to be likely.