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Byline: Roderick A. Rose (1), Susan L. Parish (1), Joan P. Yoo (1) Keywords: Material hardship; Disability; Latent class analysis; Poverty Abstract: We use data from the 2002 wave of the National Survey of America's Families to develop and validate discrete measures of material hardship that can be used to examine the difficulties that vulnerable populations such as people with disabilities have in making ends meet. Using latent class analysis, we estimate two measurement models: multidimensional and omnibus. The multidimensional model provides separate estimates for food, medical, and housing and utilities hardship. The omnibus model is a single model of 11 hardship indicators. Results show three distinct classes of food hardship, three classes of medical hardship, and two classes of housing/utilities hardship. The omnibus model reveals eight classes. Both the multidimensional and omnibus models are largely invariant between women with disabilities and women without disabilities, indicating that valid comparisons can be made between these populations using these classes of hardship. These classes can be utilized in further research on the hardship of women with disabilities to inform the development of policies targeted to alleviate the specific forms of hardship experienced by disabled women. Author Affiliation: (1) University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA Article History: Registration Date: 22/12/2008 Received Date: 05/11/2008 Accepted Date: 22/12/2008 Online Date: 13/01/2009

The application of normative economic theory for the development an analytical framework to conceptualize poverty is described. The re-examination of the capability approach, through the analysis of social welfare based on poverty literature, is presented.

Poverty concentration has a significant negative effect on the fiscal health of cities in that it increases spending on antipoverty programs and also raises the cost of providing more general public services such as police and fire protection. Spending patterns among Southern California cities over the last two decades show that poverty strongly influences local public expenditures after controlling for demographic, institutional, and fiscal characteristics of cities. Moreover, the fiscal burden of poverty has increased more rapidly for general expenditures than it has for antipoverty programs per se. Because the general service impacts of poverty are typically uncompensated under state and federal fiscal policies, poor cities experience significantly higher uncompensated costs and face growing fiscal pressures. These pressures reinforce patterns of poverty and inequality within the Southern California region and likely fuel exurbanization and environmental degradation. Key Words: fiscal disparity, urban poverty concentration, local public expenditure, uncompensated poverty costs, Southern California

First version received February 1999; final version accepted February 2002 (Eds.) Does the market economy exacerbate inequality across households? In a capitalistic society, do the rich maintain a high level of wealth at the expense of the poor? Or would an accumulation of the wealth by the rich eventually trickle down to the poor and pull the latter out of poverty? This paper presents a theoretical framework, in which one can address these questions in a systematic way. The model focuses on the role of the credit market, which determines the joint evolution of the distribution of wealth and the interest rate. A complete characterization of the steady states is provided. Under some configurations of the parameter values, the model predicts an endogenous and permanent separation of the population into the rich and the poor, where the rich maintains a high level of wealth partially due to the presence of the poor. Under others, the model predicts the Kuznets curve, i.e. the wealth eventually trickles down from the rich to the poor, eliminating inequality in the long run.

There has for many years been debate over the relationships between population growth rate and poverty. India is a country which provides a good testing ground for hypotheses about this relationship because since Independence a relatively high proportion of the population have lived in poverty; and there also exist reasonable data. This paper develops a simple structural model to investigate the relationship between population growth and poverty in particular, testing a series of hypotheses developed from the work of Marx and Malthus. The data are analysed at state level, and attention is drawn to the problems that this might cause as behaviour is typically determined at the individual household level. The results show that agricultural productivity and the process of landlessness are better predictors of poverty at a state level than the population growth rate. It is argued that the results fit better with the views of Marx than those of Malthus.

An analysis is presented on childhood poverty. Topics include the different forms childhood poverty assumes, defined in terms of severity, spacing and duration, along with its distribution and extent. Assistance targeting strategies are also discussed.

The causes of and variables involved in rural poverty in India are discussed. The investigation into the autocorrelations in the poverty and output series are intended to help come up with better econometric models than what have been generated so far. The theory linking poverty with lean agricultural years is considered valid in view of the country's closed economy. Furthermore, the correlation between unexpected inflation and poverty is partly supported.

This paper derives budgetary rules for the allocation of an exogenously supplied budget to mutually exclusive socioeconomic groups so that the maximum reduction of poverty for society as a whole is attained. Budgetary rules are derived for two mechanisms of intra-group benefit distribution and for the cases where the effects of economic interaction within and between groups is considered and where it is not. A computer simulation of the budgetary rules on a hypothetical economy demonstrates the importance of economic interaction both to the optimal allocation of benefits and to the resulting reduction in poverty.

An essential result from the poverty research of the 1970s was an indication that much poverty was episodic, in contrast to then-conventional stereotypes about the poor. However, recent treatments of poverty in the U.S. have emphasized the increase of chronic poverty. This study tests the hypothesis of increasing intragenerational chronicity by using a series of multiyear windows that track income experiences of households from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) from 1968 to 1987. Results show an increase in the incidence of chronic poverty after 1973, with an acceleration in the early 1980s. Thereafter, as the annual poverty rate begins to decline, chronicity levels off at rates consistent with the heightened chronicity observed during the late 1970s. As expected, the trends are sharper among blacks and women than among whites and men, and are sharpest of all among black female-headed households.

It has been argued that the failure of the U.K. government to bring down the child poverty rates is due to the success of government policy in generating economic growth. This argument misses wider problems in the household income distribution and the data that suggests that those who remained poor are in worse conditions is an example of this.

The consequences of social programs on the economic well-being and behavior of the citizens are tracked by policymakers by turning towards the research community. Social indicators based on data collected from these research communities play a major role providing quantitative evidence of social policy success or failure in academic and policy circles.

In this paper I show that persistent inequality in the distribution of human capital and a negative relation between initial inequality and steady-state aggregate output may follow from the fact that the poor require relatively higher returns to increase expenditure on education. Moreover, I show that poverty traps emerging in models where individual transitions do not depend on aggregate dynamics, though not robust to the introduction of idiosyncratic uncertainty, may still be relevant observationally, if idiosyncratic shocks occur with low probability. In this context, I also analyse the implications of introducing a public education system.

The effects of macropolicy reform on real incomes of poor households in Cameroon, The Gambia, Madagascar and Niger, are examined using a general equilibrium model.

Although explanations of differentials in the incidence and prevalence of poverty have been discussed in terms of structural characteristics, the traditional conceptualization and measurement of poverty has focused on economic conditions of individuals. Using Blau's (1974, 1977) general macrosociological model as an analytic framework, this paper shifts the focus away from characteristics of individuals to a structural level. Viewed as a latent construct, the concept of poverty is operationalized using data from rural areas of the United States. Findings from the confirmatory factor model (in LISREL) indicate that when there is explicit recognition of correlations within the error matrix, the conceptual model conforms to the data extremely well. The paper suggests that while there will always be a need for programs geared toward the plight of individuals in poverty, within the framework of rural development, the community is perhaps the more relevant level for long-range solutions.

A coherent approach to the estimation of conditional poverty indices is proposed. The method requires the estimation of a model of the income distribution conditional on a set of explanatory covariates using a semi-nonparametric specification, followed by calculation of any desired poverty indices from the estimated model. It avoids the three serious flaws that are evident in the logit/probit technique which is a common method of estimating the pattern of individual characteristics associated with poverty.

A dynamic simulation model was developed in Oregon to represent the poverty benchmark and identify significant demographic and economic incidences related to household transitions into and out of poverty. The model was developed utilizing the Stella II software and predicted the number of households in poverty. The factors considered in the entry into poverty were decreased in earnings, divorce or separation, child birth while unmarried and dropping out of high school. The factors considered for the exit out of poverty were child support, income increase and marriage.