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The primary purpose of this paper is to review and evaluate the causes of educational poverty in less developed countries. The basic intent in carrying out such a study is to define and derive the role of governing agencies in deliberately creating educational poverty in the country, so that the private interest of the rich and powerful ruling class can be fully safeguarded. This study is of crucial interest to the common man because majority of the people living in less developed countries are poor in spite of the fact, that almost all these countries own ample human and material resources. However, the common man in these countries is continuously suffering, generation after generation, and has been denied access to basic amenities of life. The rich and powerful ruling class, in majority of the less developed countries, has intentionally denied basic education facilities to its people for keeping them ignorant and unaware of their fundamental rights to share national resources and to gain competence for comfortable living in the society. The paper advocates a complete reversal in economic growth policies of the less developed countries so that top priority is given to those projects and programs that directly benefit the common man in the society. In this respect, the author calls for awareness among the people to exercise their economic and social rights so that people of all the strata can share equally the fruits of growth and prosperity.

This paper comments on the work of Rector et al. (1999a, 1999b). The poverty lines implicit in their restrictive material deprivation approach are disputed and the claim that America has triumphed over poverty is rejected. Evidence is presented showing that poverty among the poorest Americans has significantly increased and is now near an all time high. The long economic expansion since the recession of 1990-1991 has left hardcore poverty essentially unchanged and relative deprivation among the poorest of the poor has increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurship is often seen as the cure-all solution for poverty reduction. Proponents argue that it leads to job creation, higher incomes and lower poverty rates in the cities in which it occurs. Others argue that many entrepreneurs are actually creating low-productivity firms serving local markets. Yet, despite this debate, little research has considered the impact of entrepreneurship on poverty in cities. This paper addresses this gap using a panel of US cities for the period between 2005 and 2015. We hypothesize that the impact of entrepreneurship will depend on whether it is in tradeable sectors, so likely to have positive local multiplier effects, or non-tradeable sectors, which may saturate local markets. We find that entrepreneurship in tradeables reduces poverty and increases incomes for non-entrepreneurs, a result we confirm using an instrumental variable approach, taking the inheritance of entrepreneurial traits as the instruments. In contrast, while there are some economic benefits from non-tradeable entrepreneurship, we find these are not large enough to reduce poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the impact of tourism on total and extreme monetary poverty, in order to illuminate the debate surrounding the links between tourism and poverty. We apply fixed effects models to panel data on the Peruvian departments for the period 2001-2013. We also identify the key factors in the tourism model affecting the empirical results. Our findings show that tourism is important for the poor, but its benefits do not reach the extreme poor to the same extent, and its potential is not fully exploited. The weak macroenvironment and low community participation impede poverty reduction through tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International labour migration is a multidimensional process and primarily a family mechanism intended to reduce vulnerabilities associated with underlying inequalities. However, for immigrants, the break-up of physical contact with family members is an enduring feature of vulnerability in their communication with origins (often in developing countries). On the whole, family relationships are transformed: the absence of physical contact is traded-off with remittances sent home to family members. Remittances create potential for resilience by increasing human development of children, while reducing extreme poverty at the local level. Remittance flows are also an important source of foreign exchange for countries of origin. However, labour markets' polarization, backlash, and economic downturns at destinations (often in developed countries), and governments' moral hazard, currency revaluation, and production inertia at origins recreate vulnerabilities and disrupt the potential build-up of resilience. In fact, the re-creation of vulnerabilities largely outweighs the generation of resilience threads. The paper develops a typology that highlights the dynamic interaction between vulnerabilities and resilience, revealing the multiple aspects of people and remittances flows, the potential for mainstreaming migration policies into economic development, and the scale of the policy task to reduce vulnerabilities associated to international labour migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper uses a comprehensive dataset on social spending covering the period 1984–2010 for developing countries, and the unique cross-country database on poverty to explore the poverty-reducing role of social protection during financial crises. The results indicate that financial crises are associated with increases in the rates of growth of the poverty headcount and the poverty gap of 12% and 7%, respectively. These detrimental poverty effects of financial crises are significantly lower in countries with higher social spending, suggesting the importance of social protection for poverty reduction in times of crisis and potential gains from policy intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article uses two data sets- the 1940 and 1950 census files- in combination with the three subsequent census files to describe long-run trends in black poverty. The paper described a forty-year record of progress in reducing black poverty. The optimism that should have resulted from that progress was tempered by three other events of the 1970's: the accelerating breakup of the black family, the growing numbers of black men with little contact with the labor market, and a continued slowdown in economic growth. As a result, we have entered a new racial era in the U.S., in which black labor market progress no longer guarantees improvements in economic welfare, especially for the black underclass. Trends in labor market wages of black men and women represent only a first step in understanding the changes in black poverty that have taken place. The paper concludes with an examination of the downside of black economic progress-the in- creasing disengagement of many black men from the labor market.

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The relationships among various subsets of economic development, poverty, crime, and/or income inequality have been separately investigated in several theoretical and empirical studies. However, there has been very little empirical analysis on the interdependence among all these variables in one framework. This paper examines the causality between economic development and poverty while incorporating crime and inequality. It employs a co-integration test, a 4-variable vector autoregressive (VAR) model, and a Granger test in the US over the period 1959–2001. Findings reveal a feedback loop mechanism between economic development, poverty, and crime. Interestingly, income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient has no important impact on any of the variables. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The spatial diffusion of poverty and the demographic profile of the “poor” in cities like Los Angeles, where 1.7 million residents of the greater metropolitan area qualify as such, suggest that poverty is neither a socioeconomic exception nor affiliated with a singular sociocultural or racial group. However, our policy discourse and solutions continue to suffer from a modernist/industrial era explanation of poverty and its spatial concentration. In this paper, I will offer an alternative interpretation of economic development in the 20th century and propose that development projects fit comfortably into the political philosophy of nation building and the social construction of citizenship. Under the umbrella of social justice and democracy, many regions of the world, including the inner city, have been envisioned as landscapes of social and political instability and targeted for development as such. Here, the equating of development with stability is examined theoretically to suggest that anti-poverty policies, both in the US and the UK, can be viewed as an extension of the 20th century modernist nation-building agenda. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In the First World countries, the industrial evolution of the developing countries is observed with concern. The are considered a strong competence in the international marked and the are held responsible for the decreasing life standard in the United States and in Europe. This is the reason to consider restrictions of the commercial relations which could limit also the Third World productivity. Paul Krugman, a professor of economics at Stanford University en Palo Alto, California, is convinced that this fear doesn't have any real base. He argues, supported by a sequence of models, which present the economic relations between the First and the Third World, that the developing countries really don't influence on the life standard or the developed countries. It shouldn't be necessary to impose import retrictions which only would hinder the economic growth of the Third World nations, and therefore the hope for a decent life standard of millions of human beings who live today in conditions of absolute poverty. Agreeing completely with the author's goals, I present here a critical discussion of the respective paper. My critics are mainly directed to the model's structure. I believe that one can use more realistic structures without modifying Krugman's final final conclusions. Some suggestions are made in this sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses about establishment of welfare reform by Family Assistance Plan (FAP), as a major social policy goal. Former U.S. President James E. Carter placed welfare reform -- the Program for Better Jobs and Income (PBJI) -- high on his legislative agenda. The FAB and PBJI were both variants of the negative income tax. Former President Ronald Wilson Reagan also placed welfare reform at the center of his social policy agenda in his first year in office. This paper focuses on the welfare cuts and suggests how their effects will differ by race. A table in article presents 1980 data on the incidences of pretransfer and official poverty of white and nonwhite persons; on the dependence of the pretransfer poor on cash welfare and nonwelfare transfers; and on the antipoverty effectiveness of the two types of transfers, measured by the percentage of pretransfer poor persons taken out of poverty by transfers. The Reagan program assumes that those who remain poor will be better off waiting for economic growth to trickle down from those above them rather than relying on welfare and public jobs programs.

This paper examines why Canadian poverty rates fell relative to U. S. poverty rates during the periods 1970-1979 and 1979-1986. During the 1970s the principal reason for declining Canadian poverty rates is higher economic growth. During the 1980s, however, differences in government transfer policy are the main cause of relative poverty change in the two countries. Virtually all of the 3.3 point fall in relative Canadian/U.S. poverty rates from 1979 to 1986 can be attributed to expansions in the Canadian transfer system and simultaneous contractions in U. S. transfers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies the relationship between economic growth and the extent of poverty among American families in order to find ways to reduce the poverty. The income distribution stretches as average income grows; if this were not true, poverty would long since have ceased to be a problem. In colonial times, the income gap between the very poor and all but the very rich must have been at most a few hundred dollars. Since the median income in the U.S. now is well above any upper bound of poverty, if the dispersion of income had remained constant as its central tendency grew, no one would now be poor. But the dispersion of income expands along with its central tendency. The quintile boundaries of the income distribution rise approximately by the same percentages, thus bringing widening absolute differentials. This accords with our retributive standards of justice; people are rewarded in proportion to their relative degrees of social worth or productivity. It incidentally guarantees the persistence of poverty without public policies designed to redistribute income or earning power.

Reviewing recent research on poverty in the United States, we derive a conceptual framework with three main characteristics. First, poverty is multidimensional, compounding material hardship with human frailty, generational trauma, family and neighborhood violence, and broken institutions. Second, poverty is relational, produced through connections between the truly advantaged and the truly disadvantaged. Third, a component of this conceptual framework is transparently normative, applying empirical research to analyze poverty as a matter of justice, not just economics. Throughout, we discuss conceptual, methodological, and policy-relevant implications of this perspective on the study of extreme disadvantage in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social and interregional inequality patterns across US states from 1929–2012 are analyzed using exploratory space–time methods. The results suggest complex spatial dynamics for both inequality series that were not captured by the stylized model of Alonso. Interpersonal income inequalities of states displayed a U-shaped pattern ending the period at levels that exceeded the alarmingly high patterns that existed in the 1920s. Social inequality is characterized by greater mobility than that found for state per capita incomes. Spatial dependence is also distinct between the two series, with per capita incomes exhibiting strong global spatial autocorrelation, while state interpersonal income inequality does not. Local hot and cold spots are found for the per capita income series, while local spatial outliers are found for state interpersonal inequality. Mobility in both inequality series is found to be influenced by the local spatial context of a state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little sociological attention over the last two decades has focused on the deprivation experienced by indigenous people. Fusing insights from American Indian history and the race and labor market inequality literatures, we address this gap in this article through a historically informed labor market analysis of poverty-an analysis that considers the pervasiveness of contemporary Native poverty, its potential basis in labor market opportunities, and the extent to which it has been patterned by two major demographic and economic shifts: (1) the rapid urbanization of the American Indian population and (2) the proliferation of tribally owned casinos. Findings reveal, most notably, the incredibly rigid and durable character of poverty for this population, historically and currently and across geographic space, and with little overall impact of local labor market opportunity. The presence of tribal casinos reduces such poverty, but only to a small degree and not nearly enough to compensate for sizable American Indian and white poverty differentials. Group history is key, we conclude, to shaping how space, labor markets, and economic development reduce or buttress relations of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many researchers advocate active local government responses to poverty and other economic disparities. In doing so, they raise a generally unexplored question: can local governments themselves influence poverty net of other determinants? This study extends past research in two ways by (1) analyzing the poverty-reducing role of county governments and (2) evaluating new relationships pertaining to the comparative influence of government capacity and specific policies. The authors assess the degree to which county government capacity and economic development policies relate to disparities in job growth, individual and child poverty, and household income. The empirical analysis is based on a unique set of primary and secondary data on county governments for the post-2000 period. County government capacity as measured by county centralization and autonomy from upper-level government is related to economic growth and poverty reduction. By contrast, policy variables have little consistent association with economic disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prevailing measures of relative poverty are unchanged when all incomes grow or contract by the same proportion. This property stems from seemingly implausible assumptions about the disutility of relative deprivation and the cost of social inclusion. We propose "weakly relative" lines that relax these assumptions. On calibrating our measures to national poverty lines and survey data, we find that half the population of the developing world in 2005 lived in poverty, only half of whom were absolutely poor. The total number of poor rose over 1981 to 2005 despite falling numbers of absolutely poor. With sustained economic growth, the incidence of relative poverty became less responsive to further growth. The number of relatively poor rose, just as the numbers of absolutely poor fell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there has been some research on the impacts of federal tax and transfer policies on poverty rates for immigrants, virtually no previous work investigates the most disadvantaged group of immigrants: refugees. We estimate probit models for three standard measures of poverty. We find that while immigrants and refugees in particular had much higher poverty rates in the early 1990s, the strong economic growth of the 1990s led to a convergence of those poverty rates by 2000. Our analysis demonstrates that the improvement was largely because of economic conditions and that welfare reform policies appear to have little differential impact on immigrants or refugees. We also find that refugees show a markedly greater response to local labor market conditions than other immigrants or native born. ( JEL H3, I3, J1) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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 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.

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 presents abstracts on city planning-related topics, including visions of waterfront development in postindustrial Philadelphia, the construction of a town planning perception of Colombo, and city planning and the U.S. census.

The article presents abstracts on urban studies including one about domestic space in the mid-20th century in Turkey, collective homeownership in the U.S. and the politics of sate fair employment practices legislation in the North 1945-1964.

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 considers whether the economic transformation in the United States during the 1990s included the reduction of poverty in metropolitan (metro) areas. The authors investigate poverty change over the last business cycle, a period of overall strong economic growth. Their analysis identifies evidence of both poverty reduction and persistence. Findings show a general decline in poverty, with decline greatest in the metro areas with the highest poverty rates at the beginning of the last business cycle. Yet the relatively strong economy did not move the metro areas with the highest poverty from their relative position. The article documents that the underlying factors affecting metro-area poverty will have to be changed to fundamentally address poverty in high-poverty-rate metro areas. Reliance on changes in the macro economy will not be sufficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1947, Harry S. Truman could scarcely imagine that "anyone thought [India] was important." But only a decade later, Senator John F. Kennedy put forward a radically different appraisal of the value of India, and the strategic meaning of poverty. The sheer scale of India's deprivation, he argued, made it the decisive ideological battleground, and "a world power with a world audience" in its own right. In the minds of American planners, India's position at the center of a line of containment gradually gave way to its more crucial function as a model of economic development. The goal of representing India as an authentically Western model, distinct from China, underlay an aid relationship that created the "problem" of hunger and then made solving it an international goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional science is highly relevant in assessing issues that tangibly impact our lives. Conversely, economics is so fixated on mathematical rigor that it does not have the impact on policy that it should. Similar constructive criticisms apply to geography. To illustrate how regional scientists are more "grounded," three examples show how their analysis can defeat popular misconceptions held by the media: (1) the role of energy resources in explaining Alberta's long run growth; (2) how the largest U.S. cities are not growing increasingly more dominant; and (3) how considering American high poverty clusters can help inform international poverty research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the conundrum of why the nonelderly poverty rate in the U.S. has failed to decline as the economy has expanded. The lack of improvement in the poverty rate reflects a weakened relationship between poverty and the macroeconomy. The authors find that the lack of improvement despite rising living conditions is due to the stagnant growth in median wages and increasing inequality. Holding all else equal, changes in female labor supply should have reduced poverty further, but an increase in the rate of female heads of families may have worked in the opposite direction.

This article synthesizes an extensive literature on how local characteristics might affect the nature of poverty, particularly U.S. rural poverty. The attributes discussed include the natural environment, economic structure, public and community institutions, social norms, and demographic characteristics. In each case, the author discusses the ways in which these attributes can affect poverty and indicates what this implies about effective antipoverty policies. Multiple causal factors affect place-specific outcomes and interact so that "outcome" and "cause" are difficult to untangle. One implication is that both place-based and people-based policies may be necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thesis of this study is that as a result of increased inequalities in welfare rules, the 1996 welfare reform act not only enhanced incentives for poor families to move but also (and perhaps more important) created disincentives for them to stay in "race to the bottom" states. In testing this thesis, we evaluated the mediating and moderating roles of state economic development and family structure. We merged data from three main sources: the 1996-1999 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database, and state economic data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Modeling both destination (pull) and departure (push) effects of welfare policy measures and selected covariates in a nested discrete-time event-history migration analysis, we found robust support for the thesis that stringency in state welfare-eligibility and behavior-related rules stimulated interstate out-migration of poor families in the United States. However poor families were not drawn to states with relatively more-lenient welfare rules, although stringency in state welfare dollar benefits inhibited in-migration and state unemployment patterns may have conditioned the migration effects of welfare-reform rules on the choice of destination. Single mothers were not more directly affected by welfare-eligibility and behavior-related rules than were poor married couples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role and impact of community participation in the development of the Roxbury Master Plan in Boston, Massachusetts. It describes how residents and activists utilized the Roxbury Master Plan as a tool to raise challenges to planning ideas perceived as detrimental to the neighborhood, Discussion of this master plan provides a laboratory for examining race and class relationships and tensions generated by proposals for economic development strategies based on benefiting powerful institutional players as a way of helping low-income, neighborhoods. Review of the development of this neighborhood master plan between the period 1999 and 2003 shows how residents can use community participation to ensure adoption of broad economic development strategies advocated by proponents of big business that do not spell dislocation and gentrification for poor and working-class neighborhoods. The case study also represents a critique of smart growth and New Urbanism as planning concepts in terms of how issues of race, class, and social inequality are approached or ignored by some planners. The study is based on the author's involvement in the development of the Roxbury Master Plan, including participation in meetings and interviews with residents, elected officials, and representatives of city government between 1999 when the Roxbury Master Plan was officially launched and its completion in 2003. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study which examined welfare reform and labor markets in the U.S. in the 1990s. Discussion of whether President Bill Clinton supported specific measures to assist the poor; Details of the argument that welfare reform has been a failure in terms of addressing poverty problems; Role of economic growth in solving poverty.

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.

Policies directed toward alleviating poverty and caring for the needy have become the scapegoat of those who decry the way in which our policies are theorized, developed, and implemented. This is not necessarily because they are the most faulty policies in the policy universe, but because they are, due to a constellation of circumstances, less culturally and politically defensible than are most policies. Most of them lack a strong constituent base, and most seem alien to the premises of democratic capitalism. A fundamental resource allocation problem confronts the many poor people, especially those who face major financial shortfalls due to injury, death of a family breadwinner, or unemployment. These individuals have a rightful claim on the U.S. government's resources to help them overcome their economic disadvantage.

The article provides information on the development of East Asian societies compared to Western societies in 1994. It mentions that the U.S. could wait until the proof of East Asian success becomes too overwhelming and strong to ignore before determining whether it should compete the East Asians in critical self-analysis. It states that the U.S. could start reflecting on how and why it has to question its fundamental presumptions about its political and social arrangements, and learn from East Asian societies.

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.