A New Scale of Poverty: How the Officially Recorded Poor People in Turkey Perceive Themselves

Governments adopt policies to prevent and address the socioeconomic problem of poverty. This article examines how officially recorded poor people perceive themselves and the causes of their poverty. It is based on a sample of 531 officially recorded poor people living in the Turkish province of Çankiri. A questionnaire was administered comprising 69 characteristics of poverty. The findings suggest that there are four main causal explanations for poverty attributions: fatalism, discrimination, moral deficiencies and personal deficiencies. The measure developed for this research can be tested and applied to different cultural groups with a high level of validity and reliability.     

Exile to Poverty: Policies and Poverty Among Refugees in Poland

Poverty is a well‐known short‐term outcome of migration in general and a long‐term outcome of forced migration in a global context. Surprisingly, this outcome appears among refugees in welfare states which provide various asylum and social policies facilitating integration. The article aims to explore the relationship between asylum and social policies and poverty among refugees. The research results are drawn from two studies conducted among refugees, NGOs, national and local administration representatives, and case workers in Poland between 2006 and 2014. The results show that asylum policy contributes to the material and symbolic hardship experienced by refugees, and social policy is ineffective in its prevention. If refugees are settled in regions with high levels of poverty, unemployment and ethnic‐based prejudices, then they experience and continue to live in poverty. In such a context, and due to its weaknesses in addressing discrimination, social policy cannot successfully integrate refugees.     

Quantity Constraints, Poverty Lines and Poverty Orderings

By limiting the scope for substitution between commodities, other things equal quantity constraints raise the cost of living. Thus, rationed families have higher povery lines than unconstrained ones. This heterogeneity in both resources and poverty lines means that, in principle, bivariate dominance results are required to order distributions in terms of poverty.     

Informal Giving in Turkey

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Scholarly research about philanthropy has de-emphasized informal giving to friends, neighbors and others in need. Yet,...     

Children and Poverty in Ireland

SUMMARY: The life chances of children and young people can only be understood in the context of their material circumstances. Through a review of what is known about children and poverty in Ireland today, North and South, this article highlights the causes and impact of poverty and makes the case for more resources to be committed to children and their carers in the interests of both social justice and economic prudence.     

Poverty and time

We examine the measurement of individual poverty in an intertemporal context. Our aim is to capture the importance of persistence in a state of poverty and we characterize a corresponding individual intertemporal poverty measure. Our first axiom requires that intertemporal poverty is identical to static poverty in the degenerate single-period case. The remaining two properties express decomposability requirements within poverty spells and across spells in order to reflect the persistence issue. In addition, we axiomatize an aggregation procedure to obtain an intertemporal poverty measure for societies and we illustrate our new index with an application to EU countries.     

Minority Poverty in Nonmetropolitan Texas*

Abstract Despite a high prevalence of poverty among minorities in nonmetropolitan areas, research and policy concerns regarding poverty have continued focusing on metropolitan minorities. This study uses a model integrating individual, household, and structural factors to examine poverty among Latinos, blacks, and Anglos in nonmetropolitan and, for comparative purposes, metropolitan areas, using data from the 1985 Special Texas Census TDHS 1987. The findings show that minorities in nonmetropolitan areas tend to have the highest poverty rates. In addition, consistent as well as divergent patterns exist among the six ethnic-resident groups with respect to the relationships among the various individual, household, and structural factors and poverty.     

Resilience of Families Living in Poverty

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways that community social workers reflect the established literature on family resilience. This exploratory study involved semistructured group interviews with community social workers from an urban agency that serves families who are poor. The analysis was completed by comparing Walsh's “Key Processes in Family Resilience” with the responses from the participants in the group interviews. Specifically, Walsh (2002 Walsh , F. ( 2002 ). A family resilience framework: Innovative practice approaches . Family Relations , 51 ( 2 ), 130 – 137 .[Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) identifies three domains of resilient families, including belief systems, organizational patterns, and communication processes. These were used as reference points for comparison. The interviews with the community social workers revealed a connection between using positive beliefs, thinking, and taking action steps that define a resilient family. This only becomes possible in the context of supportive internal family relations and external community connections. While the community social workers affirm elements of the established models of family resilience, they also emphasized its dynamic nature as the interplay of positive family beliefs combined with action steps and support from the community.     

Theories of Global Poverty

ABSTRACT

In September 2000, participants in the United Nations Millennium Summit made a commitment to alleviating global poverty and inequality through the Millennium Development goals. This historical pledge has raised public and academic awareness of the issue of global poverty. In light of this interest, this literature review seeks to clarify the issues surrounding global poverty by focusing on the developed world and the developing world. Given the substantial amount of interdisciplinary research on global poverty, it can be organized into at least four areas: poverty definitions, units of measurement, theories concerning resources, and findings on effective interventions. It is clear that context influences these four areas and the resulting theories relate to: (1) inclusion, exclusion, and access; (2) individual rights and responsibilities versus community focus; (3) human capital theories, structural poverty, and resource inequality; and (4) theories of welfare versus theories of development. This analysis of these four theoretical domains concludes with a conceptual framework for understanding of global poverty and the influence of the social environment on human behavior.     

Perennialism and Poverty Reduction

This article, which is both conceptual and a synthesis of the literature, considers the research component of poverty alleviation strategies for people whose livelihoods depend significantly on tree and forest resources. Two policy approaches are contrasted: enhancing the utilisation of indigenous tree species within the household and the local economy, and integrating tree and forest‐dependent peoples into the wider economy by promoting the commercialisation of conventional tree crop production. It is argued that the discussion is relevant for other poor peoples who depend on perennial production systems, and that the conclusions contribute to the wider debate about remoteness, market access, decentralisation and targeting in policy formulation, and globalisation.     

A New Poverty Decomposition

This note proposes a new poverty decomposition that can be used to explain changes in poverty over time. The change in poverty is derived as the exact sum of four elements: (i) the overall growth effect, assuming inequality in the distribution does not change; (ii) the impact of differences in growth rates between the groups; (iii) the effect of the change in inequality within the different groups; (iv) the impact of changes in the population shares of the various groups.     

Livelihoods and Rural Poverty Reduction in Kenya

This article describes research linking micro‐level outcomes to macro‐level strategies with respect to rural poverty reduction in Kenya. It is set against a background in which a new government, elected at the end of 2002, is wrestling with how to break away decisively from previously unfavourable norms in the conduct of public life. The research undertaken in ten villages in Suba and Bomet districts in 2001 and 2002 confirms governance problems as having a broadly debilitating effect on rural livelihoods. Rolling back this pattern of public service behaviour needs to be made a priority; otherwise national goals to improve education, health and the transport infrastructure will reap significantly lower gains than are potentially possible.     

Poverty Research in a Development Policy Context

This article provides an evaluation of the extent to which science is addressing worldwide poverty and hunger. It is based on the literature contained in the Thomson Reuters' Web of Science Citation Index (1980 to 2008) and focuses on the WOTRO Strategy Plan 2007–2010 of the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research, although similar policies from other countries might also be assessed. The data show that poverty/hunger research has grown steadily over time in many disciplines, most significantly in Environmental Sciences and Technology. Much of this research is hidden; hence the construction of an internationally recognised open‐access database is recommended so that scientists can easily identify critical gaps related to scientific capacity‐building.     

Sociological Theories of Poverty in Urban America

ABSTRACT

Since the 1950s, American sociologists have developed a substantial literature on poverty in urban American communities. This literature review examines some of these sociological theories of poverty and identifies four major explanations of urban poverty: social stratification, (including segregation and racism); lack of access to social capital; cultural and value norms; and social policies. The literature review concludes with a conceptual framework that focuses on multiple relationships that link theory to practice related to the reduction of poverty in inner-city communities.     

Public Attributions for Poverty in Canada*

Les auteurs de cet article décrivent les caractéristiques sociales de la pauvreté en utilisant des données d'interviews téléphoniques effectuées en 2002 au moyen d'un échantillon aléatoire d'adultes sélectionnéà partir de huit voisinages à Toronto et Edmonton, enrichi par des données d'interviews. Une régression logistique multivariée a été utilisée afin de prédire l'attribution des caractéristiques structurelles, individualistes, intergénérationnelles et fatalistes à la pauvreté, en se servant de variables démographiques et de la variable exposition à la pauvreté. Les participants étaient plus susceptibles d'expliquer la pauvreté par des causes structurelles et moins susceptibles de favoriser une explication individualiste. Le revenu a été associé négativement à des déterminants individualistes, fatalistes et à une des causes structurelles, et lié positivement au facteur intergénérationnel.
This paper describes public attributions for poverty using data from telephone interviews conducted in 2002 with a random sample of adults from eight neighbourhoods in Toronto and Edmonton, supplemented with interview data. Multivariate logistic regression was used to predict support for structural, individualistic, intergenerational and fatalistic attributions for poverty by demographic and exposure-to-poverty variables. Participants were most likely to attribute poverty to structural causes and least likely to favour individualistic attributions. Income was negatively associated with individualistic, fatalistic and one of the structural attributions, and positively related to the intergenerational attribution.     

Poverty and psychological distress in Latin America

The objective of this paper is three-fold: first, to study the psychological distress of the Latin American poor. Second, to study differences in psychological distress between the poor and the relatively wealthy in Latin America. Third, to study how economic growth impacts the psychological well-being of the poor.This paper uses micro-level information from the Gallup 2007 Survey for 16 Latin American countries to study psychological distress of the poor in Latin America; the survey is representative at the country level. The investigation works with approximately 12,500 observations. Psychological distress is measured on the basis of a set of questions regarding a person’s emotional situation the day before he/she answered the questionnaire.The investigation finds out that the poor show greater psychological distress than the wealthy and that the gap is statistically significant. However, it would be inappropriate to attempt predicting a person’s psychological well-being on the basis of his/her poverty condition alone, since many factors affect people’s psychological well-being. The paper also shows that rapid economic growth seems to be detrimental to the psychological well-being of the poor, and that the impact of economic growth on psychological well-being differs between the poor and the relatively wealthy.     

Global Poverty in the South African Economy

Many studies have been made of the incidence of poverty in particular communities in South Africa (see Carnegie Conference Papers Nos 10–72, Maasdorp and Humphries, 1975; Simkins, 1978) but there have been no attempts to estimate the extent of poverty in the economy as a whole. This paper presents the results of crude estimates of the extent of poverty within the four ‘race’ groups, and an estimate of poverty for the whole economy. Observations are also made about past trends in poverty in the metropolitan regions. No attempt is made to provide theoretical explanations of the observed poverty, to examine the likely effects of the growth path of the economy on the incidence of poverty, or to suggest policies for the amelioration of the plight of the poor. Some directions for future research are suggested in the concluding section.