- What Role do NGOs Play in Alleviating Chronic
Poverty? (PDF) new
By Emma Harris-Curtis for
INTRAC (International NGO Traning and Research Centre)- This paper
argues that Northern non-governmental development organisations
(NGDOs) are immensely varied in terms of policy, value system and
approaches to poverty. A brief exploration is made of approaches
to extreme poverty, inclusion and the influences on NGDO policy.
Evidence is then taken from the field to explore some NGDOs’
engagement in including those often excluded by so-called NGDO
development programmes. The gaps between policy and practice of
NGDOs is then discussed. A suggestion is made whereby NGDOs might
be more inclusive in their policy and their reach to the most
poor. This is that rights approaches to development are
increasingly being researched and transposed into policy. An
explanation of rights approaches and their potential implications
for inclusion of the extremely poor then follows. Some examples,
experiences and research into the adoption of this approach by
Northern NGDOs are then offered. - [PDF]
(Added: Hits: 0)
- Chronic poverty: scrutinizing estimates, patterns,
correlates, and explanations (PDF)
Shahin Yaqub, Poverty
Research Unit, School of African and Asian Studies, Sussex
University. Working Paper No 21 Chronic Poverty Research Centre,
October 2002. The paper lists estimates of chronic poverty
incidences in 25 countries. Research reveals its ‘patterns’ and
socioeconomic ‘correlates’, but hardly ‘explanations’. The
patterns are three (economic insecurity, short-range mobility and
path dependency) and the correlates are four (spatial,
demographics and household type, human capital and labor, and
physical assets). Important similarities are observed between
developing and affluent countries in such patterns and correlates.
In countries of vastly differing wealth, apparently people face
some similar problems in fully participating and the burden of
poverty is unequally shared over time, i.e. chronic poverty.
Recognizing this, the paper draws on research in affluent
countries centered more closely on life experiences. Such
‘lifefull’ approaches to chronic poverty contrast with present
‘lifeless’ approaches in developing countries. Useful explanations
should understand the reversibility of chronic poverty, timeliness
of reversals and relevance of outcomes.
(Added: Wed Jun 11
2003 Hits: 27)
- Globalisation And Dimensions Of Poverty (PDF)
By Olli
Tammilehto, FINNIDA, 2003. Deals with the debate between various
researchers and institutions concerning the relationship between
globalisation and poverty and on the background to their
disagreement. This study proceeds mostly on the global level but
occasionally it deals with India.
(Added: Mon Mar 31
2003 Hits: 31)
- Groups, Social Influences and Inequality: A
Memberships Theory Perspective on Poverty Traps (PDF)
By Steven
N. Durlauf, Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin,
2/15/03. This essay is intended to describe a perspective on
poverty traps in which persistence in economic status is generated
by group-level influences on individuals. What distinguishes this
theory from other explanations of poverty is its emphasis on the
role of social, as opposed to individual-level characteristics.
This essay is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the
memberships theory of poverty and relates it to the specific
question of poverty traps. The role of social factors in
individual outcomes, the idea that lies at the heart of the
memberships theory, is expanded upon. The relationship between the
theory and persistent racial inequality is also addressed. Section
3 discusses evidence in support of the memberships theory. This
evidence is organized into three types: studies from history and
social psychology that demonstrate the importance of the social
factors on which the memberships theory is based, ethnographic
studies, and formal statistical analyses. I also identify some
important recent advances in empirical work that should prove to
be important in assessing the theory. Section 4 considers the
implications of a memberships perspective on poverty traps for
policy evaluation. This section characterizes the sorts of
antipoverty policies the theory seems to suggest and also
considers how data analysis for policy evaluation should be
conducted in this context.
(Added: Mon Apr 14 2003 Hits: 46)
- Growth May Be Good for the Poor-- But are IMF and
World Bank Policies Good for Growth?
In a paper released last
March by the World Bank's Development Research Group, Bank
economists David Dollar and Aart Kraay confront critics of World
Bank/IMF policies with new empirical research on incomes in both
developed and less developed countries. The authors conclude that
"growth generally does benefit the poor and that anyone who cares
about the poor should favor the growth-enhancing policies of good
rule of law, fiscal discipline, and openness to international
trade."(p.27) This research misses the mark in several crucial
respects. Most importantly, the real debate has never been about
whether "growth does generally benefit the poor"-- which hardly
anyone would deny. The more important question is: what has caused
the dramatic slowdown in economic growth over the last two
decades, and how much of it is attributable to the policies of the
IMF and the World Bank?
(Added: Fri Aug 18 2000 Hits: 77)
- Halving Poverty by Doubling Aid: How Well Founded is
the Optimism of the World Bank? (PDF)
By Rolf J. Langhammer,
Kiel Institute for World Economics, Duesternbrooker Weg 120
D-24105 Kiel (Germany), Kiel Working Paper No. 1116 (July 2002).
The article criticizes the World Bank as overy optimistic
concerning its ability to raise the effectiveness of aid by
concentrating aid on countries with “good” policies. It is shown
that aid flows to the main recipient regions yielded the highest
correlation to growth when their magnitudes shrank. It is argued
that more aid can impair the quality of domestic policies in the
recipients (endogeneity problem). The paper instead pleads for a
shift of aid policies from country-oriented to issue-oriented aid.
An international endowment fund under supranational law should
help to finance such issues.
(Added: Mon Oct 21 2002 Hits: 26)
- Heaven or Hubris: Reflections on the ‘New Poverty
Agenda’ (PDF)
Development Policy Review, 2003, 21 (1): 5-25.
By Simon Maxwell. A new construction on poverty reduction links
the Millennium Development Goals, an international consensus on
how to reduce poverty, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, a new
set of instruments for delivering aid, and, underpinning the
others, results-based management. This new construction has
undoubted strengths. There are also cross-cutting risks, that
targets will oversimplify, citizenship will be neglected,
trade-offs and conflicts of interest will be obscured,
macro-economic policy will be neglected, social sectors will be
emphasised at the expense of growth policies, and commitment to
partnership will degrade into a form of covert conditionality.
These risks are not immutable. A way forward is proposed, with a
list of six principles and a set of Dos and
Don’ts.
(Added: Mon Feb 10 2003 Hits: 63)
- How Not To Count The Poor
By S.G. Reddy and T.W.
Pogge, June 14, 2002, Socialanalysis.org. Abstract: The estimates
of the extent, distribution and trend of global income poverty
provided in the World Bank's World Development Reports for 1990
and 2000/01 are neither meaningful nor reliable. The Bank uses an
arbitrary international poverty line unrelated to any clear
conception of what poverty is. It employs a misleading and
inaccurate measure of purchasing power "equivalence" that creates
serious and irreparable difficulties for international and
intertemporal comparisons of income poverty. It extrapolates
incorrectly from limited data and thereby creates an appearance of
precision that masks the high probable error of its estimates. The
systematic distortion introduced by these three flaws likely leads
to a large understatement of the extent of global income poverty
and to an incorrect inference that it has declined. A new
methodology of global poverty assessment is feasible and
necessary. (From Eldis)
(Added: Wed Aug 07 2002 Hits: 69)
- MIGRATION AND CHRONIC POVERTY (pdf file)
Uma
Kothari March 2002 Institute for Development Policy and Management
University of Manchester Working Paper No 16. This paper provides
an overview of conceptual understandings of, and methodological
research issues on, the relationship between chronic, or
long-term, poverty and processes of migration. The paper presents
a framework to enable an analysis of social relations and
processes of exclusion, and the ways in which these are structured
around poverty-related capitals. While livelihood strategies are
diverse and multiple, for many poor people, migration represents a
central component of these. This paper explores how research can
be carried out to examine the characteristics of those who move
and those who stay, the processes by which they are compelled or
excluded from adopting migration as a livelihood strategy and the
circumstances under which migration sustains chronic poverty or
presents an opportunity to move out of poverty.
(Added: Wed Mar 12
2003 Hits: 19)
- Myths About Poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand
The Myths
about Poverty project is aimed at identifying some of the myths
that have developed about poverty in New Zealand, and to provide
facts to help people make their own minds about what is true and
what isn't.
(Added: Mon Apr 17 2000 Hits: 71)
- poverty A SUBJECT
growth of poverty level is
largely due to misunderstanding poverty. Measures controlling
poverty should be linked to the suitability of the country, as
reasons of poverty changes due to social conditions of the
country
(Added: Tue Nov 27 2001 Hits: 189)
- Poverty in the Transition: Social Expenditures and
the Working Age
By Jeni Klugman, John Micklewright and Gerry
Redmond. Written for the EBRD 10th anniversary conference. This
paper reviews poverty across the transition countries, emphasising
the phenomenon of the working-age poor. It includes analysis of
whether credible unemployment benefit schemes would aid labour
market reform in the CIS and hence help solve the problem there of
in-work poverty. INNOCENTI WORKING PAPERS No. 91
(UNICEF).
(Added: Thu Jun 20 2002 Hits: 44)
- Poverty Production: A Different Approach To Poverty
Understanding (PDF)
International Social Science Council,
Comparative Research Programme on Poverty. By Else Øyen, (2002).
Poverty understanding and poverty research can be said to have
gone through roughly three phases: Tale-telling, studies with a
client focus as well as development research, and knowledge
building about poverty reduction. The stage is now set for a new
phase, that of understanding the processes that produce poverty
and continue to produce poverty at a rate no present poverty
reducing measures can possibly win over or even compete with. The
challenge ahead is to make poverty production visible and place it
firmly on the research agenda.
(Added: Mon Mar 31
2003 Hits: 29)
- Private sector development: pro-poor, or merely
poor, service delivery?
European Network on Debt and Development
(Eurodad) (2002)** Privatisation was another key reform under the
SAPs, the impacts of which has been subject to extensive debate.
In this paper, we look at the World Bank Group’s (WBG) newly
developed proposal for Private Sector Development (PSD) to see how
the document deals with the challenges of pro-poor development and
whether it takes into account lessons learnt from previous
experiences with private sector development, especially with
privatisation operations, in particular as regards the impact on
poverty reduction – in other words, whether the voices of the poor
are heard.
(Added: Thu Nov 07 2002 Hits: 15)
- Reaching the Poor: The Influence of Policy and
Administrative Processes on the Implementation of Government
Poverty Schemes in India
Radhika Nayak, N.C. Saxena and John Farrington.
Working Paper 175,Overseas Development Institute, September 2002
Farrington.This study was conceived within the frame of a wider
study on the diversification of rural livelihoods in India.
Briefly, the wider study aims to identify what policy initiatives
might better support the poor in their search for enhanced
livelihoods. A first prerequisite for any such scheme to impact on
the poor is that funds allocated under it should actually reach
the poor. The study focuses on four broad types of poverty
reduction schemes.
(Added: Thu Sep 18 2003 Hits: 1)
- Sector Wide Programmes And Poverty Reduction
Working
Paper 157, November 2001. By Mick Foster & Sadie
Mackintosh-Walker, Centre for Aid and Public Expenditure, Overseas
Development Institute, UK. This study is based on a review of
material on a range of sector programmes selected by the
availability of material to the authors. Conclusions drawn are
mainly limited to presenting information on how the current
generation of SWAps (Sector Wide Approachs) is addressing poverty
concerns, and some necessarily tentative judgements on
effectiveness. This report was originally commissioned by the
Government of Finland on behalf of the likeminded donor group, in
order to: Collect information on how effectively sector wide
approaches are tackling poverty reduction objectives; Identify
some lessons drawn from current good practice on how they can do
so more effectively in future. It is a follow up to a previous
paper on the Status of SWAps, commissioned by Ireland for the
like-minded donor meeting in Dublin in 2000.
(Added: Mon Jan 13
2003 Hits: 16)
- Serving the World's Poor, Profitably
by Dr.
C.K. Prahalad and Dr. Allen Hammond (World Resources Institute,
Markle Foundation). Global firms have demonstrated their ability
to create wealth around the world. But the benefits of the
capabilities of these firms and of the global market system do not
yet reach most of the 4 billion people who live in relative
poverty at the bottom of the ecnomic pyramid. A report that looks
at two possible scenarios for the evolution of the global market
in the coming 15 years.
(Added: Wed Nov 13 2002 Hits: 39)
- Taking the Expansive View: From Access to Outcomes -
Utilizing the Knowledge-Based Economy to Empowe
Authors:
Akhtar Badshah & Satish Jha, Digital Partners Institute, India
(January 2002). The authors assert that ICTs do have the
capability to alleviate poverty and that we ignore that potential
at out peril. A number of examples of poor people using ICTs to
improve their livelihoods are given. The authors argue that
technology must be focused on the real needs of the poor,
understand the challenges they face and that investment must reach
a critical mass of beneficiaries. The paper addresses the argument
that ICTs are a luxury in development, that such initiatives
should not take place until basic needs have been met. They argue
that the economic benefits ICTs can bring a community can allow it
to finance its own infrastructure and social service needs. The
paper outlines a number of initiatives that provide a model for
ICT development for rural poverty alleviation (Description from
Eldis Poverty Reporter).
(Added: Mon Sep 16 2002 Hits: 18)
- The Cost of Living...in Poverty
Experts agree: The blight
of poverty housing reaches beyond rotting roofs and insufficient
sanitation systems. It casts low-income families into an
unforgiving cycle of physical and emotional duress, compromising
their health, academic achievement and sense of security. The
following pages offer commentary on the impact substandard housing
has on families, and the destructive force it circulates
throughout the lives of children and parents.
(Added: Mon Jul 01
2002 Hits: 72) |
