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The question of high welfare re-entry rates has attracted great attention from economists and policymakers. Using a very rich administrative data set for the minimum income program of the Madrid Government (over 50,000 spells), this paper aims to broach various questions arising from the issue of welfare re-entry. We try to identify what factors determine observed differences in the durations of the first off-welfare spell. We analyze the combined effects of the length and type of exit of the first spell, unemployment, and sociodemographic characteristics. The experience of the first spell and, to a lesser extent, employability can contribute toward lengthening the time spent outside the program. Our results also show that off-welfare spells of households leaving the program in periods of low economic growth will be longer than those that do so during economic expansions. With the exception of unemployment effects, our estimates yield very similar results to those obtained in the U.S. studies, suggesting that U.S. welfare policies and analyses are not entirely irrelevant for European discussions of welfare policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 300 rural counties are more prosperous than the nation. Each has lower unemployment rates, lower poverty rates, lower school dropout rates, and better housing conditions than the nation. Prosperous counties tend to have more educated populations, more diverse economies, more private non-farm jobs, more farmers and government farm payments, more creative class occupations, and more equal income distributions. They have fewer African-American, American Indian, or Hispanic residents and fewer recent immigrants. Some findings support what many rural people believe to be true: civically engaged religious groups and other identities that bind people together can really matter. Other results contradict conventional wisdom. For instance, climate and distances to cities and major airports, are relatively unimportant. Focusing on prosperity, instead of growth or competitiveness, provides new insights into rural conditions and prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article criticizes the use of the Misery Index as a gauge of macroeconomic performance. The use of the Misery Index by U.S. President George Bush symbolizes the almost exclusive focus of economic policy in the 1980s on growth and price stability. There is no doubt that the rate of economic growth and the rate of inflation should be two important criteria in judging the success of any economic policy. Assuming for the moment that distributional concerns are unimportant, the Misery Index still has several shortcomings that diminish its usefulness as a policy indicator. First, the index is generally used to judge the success or failure of economic policy in specified periods. Another limitation of the Misery Index is that it simply adds together the unemployment and inflation rates unweighted. Economic justice, like macroeconomic performance, has many dimensions, and capturing its trends can be difficult. Nonetheless, two prominent indicators of absolute and relative economic well-being are the poverty rate and overall income inequality. The sum of the two produces what we call the Poverty And Inequality (PAIN) index. Between 1980 and 1990, the Misery Index declined about 50 percent, a fact which the Bush administration heralded. At the same time, however, the PAIN index rose by about 8 percent, despite eight consecutive years of overall economic expansion.

The article presents an analysis of neighborhood change in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1980s using two-wave panel design and causal modeling. Studies have shown that poverty predicts rates of births to unmarried mothers, juvenile delinquency, crime and drug-related problems in urban neighborhoods. Economic deprivation theory postulates that high rates of juvenile delinquency, crime and drug-related problems are associated with poor neighborhoods and suggests that a rise in poverty increases a sense of economic injustice, which results in higher rates of violence. In this article authors study interrelationships among neighborhoods' poverty levels and types of social conditions described in the urban poverty literature by examining factors related to neighborhood poverty in Cleveland at the beginning and end of the 1980s. It demonstrates the usefulness of panel analysis using LISREL (Linear Structural Relations) version 7.2. It reports that the Cleveland economy grew steadily throughout the 1950s, 1960s and much of the 1970s, with the emphasis on manufacturing enterprises. In the early 1980s both Cleveland and its suburbs lost a large number of manufacturing jobs either permanently or to the furthest suburbs. In the city of Cleveland 90,000 manufacturing jobs were lost between 1979 and 1983. Along with jobs loss, Cleveland lost population and investment in new housing mostly to its suburban areas.

Poverty has become an important term in contemporary America. Much has been said in recent months about its level and the prospects for its removal, with most of the discussion being concentrated upon the increasing reluctance of poverty to disappear in the face of economic growth. The author suggests that there exists in the U.S., a sizable number of individuals who are relatively unaffected by the general course of economic progress. For lack of a better term, these people may be considered to be in the "backwash" of American economic life, in effect, non-participants in the increasing affluence of this society. There has been a decline since 1956 in the rate at which poverty is eliminating. Part of this decline is due to the general sluggishness of the economy in this period. However, a substantial part must also be attributed to the presence of a "hard-core" group of people who are not basically affected by the normal processes of economic growth. The existence of a nonlinear relationship between the extent of poverty and the economic-activity variables admits the existence of a declining poverty-elimination rate and, consequently, the possibility that the future impact of economic growth and progress the extent of poverty will be minimal.