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Recurring efforts to reform welfare over the last twenty years have met with repeated failure. But on the last day of September 1988, the U.S. Congress passed what many proponents claim is a historic change in the nation's approach to dealing with dependent families. The new welfare reform legislation is thought to represent a new consensus for dealing with poverty and dependency among the able-bodied--a consensus that had previously been lacking. This paper reviews the approaches of past reform efforts which failed to unite competing views of the problems and appropriate interventions.

The accountability movement in public policy hails a new programme for US foreign assistance - the Millennium Challenge Account established in 2004 with the aim of 'picking winners' for grants among developing countries based on their demonstrated quality of governance. This article uses the MCA's own rating system to dispute its claim to know in advance which countries are best positioned to meet major development goals. High governance scores alone bear little or no relationship to growth in national income or decline in poverty. Attempting to measure public-policy performance limits the range of choice available to policy-makers, and may inadvertently limit true performance. [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.

In the article, the authors presents a reply to articles commenting on their article, "Ending Hunger in the 21st Century: Projections of the Number of Food Insecure People," published in 2001 issue of the journal "Review of Agricultural Economics," on the link between poverty and undernourishment. Improving the estimates of the number of people who are undernourished and food insecure is an important contribution research can make to a better understanding of the problem and how to address it. One of the comments begin by finding fault with the baseline estimates of the overall number of undernourished since they are higher than those of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported in "The State of Food Insecurity" annually.