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We propose families of measures for vulnerability to both individual and aggregate poverty. We view vulnerability as the burden caused by the threat of poverty. Exposure to states of the world where hardship may strike causes distress ex-ante, even if ex-post the dice are benign and poverty (consumption below a critical norm) does not materialise. We ensure our measures meet a set of desirable axioms-in the case of aggregate vulnerability, this set includes sensitivity to the degree of correlation of outcomes across individuals. We argue that individual vulnerability levels are not enough to compose the aggregate picture, e.g. because society may be wary of the threat of simultaneous, widespread poverty. We illustrate with data from Ethiopia, where rainfall risks are found to raise vulnerability to poverty despite sustained increases in consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the research on implications of the HIV epidemic for individual households and broader rural economies in the 1980s and early 1990s predicted progressive declines in agricultural production, with dire consequences for rural livelihoods. Restudies in Tanzania and Uganda show that from 1986 to the present, HIV and AIDS have sometimes thrown households into disarray and poverty, but more often have reduced development. The progressive and systematic decline predicted in earlier work has not come to pass. However, poverty remains, as does endemic HIV disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on the article by Michael Carter and Chris Barrett on asset thresholds and poverty traps concerned with developing positive theories of poverty. He believes that the giving of transfers to the poorest is not necessarily the most effective poverty-reducing policy. He considers the model proposed by Carter and Barrett as narrow in terms of its diagnosis of the problems of poverty traps and risk, and narrow in terms of the policy implications and solutions it proposes.

A response by Tony Barnett, Stefan Dercon and Janet Seeley to a letter to the editor about their article "The effects of HIV/AIDS on Rural Communities in East Africa: A Twenty Year Perspective," published in an earlier issue is presented.

Background: The HIV epidemic exacerbated the prevalence of prime-aged adult death in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, resulting in increased rates of orphanhood. Little is known about whether this will coincide with adverse psychosocial well-being in adulthood for those who were orphaned at childhood. Methods: We studied a cohort of 1108 children from Kagera, a region of Tanzania that was heavily affected by HIV early in the epidemic. During the baseline data collection in 1991-1994, these children were aged 0-16 years and had both parents alive. We followed them roughly 16-19 years later in 2010, by which time 531 children (36%) had lost either one or both parents before their 19th birthday. We compared the 2010 10-item Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) score between children who lost a parent before the age of 19 and those who did not. We used the baseline data to control for preorphanhood confounders. This is important because we find that children who will lose their fathers in the future before age 19 came from somewhat lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Results: We found no correlation between maternal death and self-esteem measured through RSES. Paternal death was strongly correlated with lower levels of self-esteem (0.2 SDs lower RSES 95% confidence interval: 0.059 to 0.348), and the correlation was stronger when the death occurred during the child's teenage years. These effects are a net of socioeconomic differences that existed before the orphanhood event. Conclusions: Our study supports the further development and piloting of programs that address psychosocial problems of orphans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents unique evidence that orphanhood matters in the long run for health and education outcomes in a region of northwestern Tanzania. We study a sample of 718 non-orphaned children surveyed in 1991-1994 who were traced and reinterviewed as adults in 2004. A large proportion, 19%, lost one or more parents before age 15 in this period, allowing us to assess permanent health and education impacts of orphanhood. In the analysis, we control for a wide range of child and adult characteristics before orphanhood, as well as community fixed effects. We find that maternal orphanhood has a permanent adverse impact of 2 cm of final height attainment and one year of educational attainment. Expressing welfare in terms of consumption expenditure, the result is a gap of 8.5% compared with similar children whose mothers survived until at least their 15th birthday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]