Negotiating poverty from midlife to pre-old age: a longitudinal study on social assistance recipients in Shanghai

The minimum living standard guarantee (MLSG) programme is part of the social security system in Mainland China designed to tackle urban poverty. To understand how the urban poor manage under this programme, this study interviewed 40 households receiving MLSG assistance in Shanghai. Our findings were as follows: (a) a large proportion of the interviewees who received MLSG assistance from the government were pushed to do so because of the massive layoffs during the economic reform; (b) the MLSG recipients were likely to be trapped in a poverty cycle from middle age up until they reached official retirement age.     

The State, Institutional Transition and the Creation of New Urban Poverty in China

Since the 1990s, the introduction of a market economy and the process of rapid urbanization have been accompanied by a new urban poverty related to lay‐offs and unemployment as well as by large‐scale rural–urban migration, which is different from the traditional urban poverty of the ‘Three Nos’ (no relatives or dependants, no working capacity and no source of income). This article focuses on new urban poverty in China under market transition and discusses the causes of poverty creation. Instead of considering Chinese new urban poverty only as a result of market mechanisms, it argues that the state as the manipulator of institutions and policies does matter in the creation of new urban poverty, and that the cleavages between the old and new institutions further intensify it. Specifically, the following aspects of the creation of new urban poverty are examined in detail: the adjustment of industrial policy, the reform of state‐owned enterprises, evolution of the household registration system, and the transformation of the welfare state.     

Can the minimum living standard guarantee scheme enable the poor to escape the poverty trap in rural China?

The rural Minimum Living Standard Guarantee (Dibao) Scheme is the most important social assistance programme in rural China. However, how the rural Dibao programme affects household expenditures and whether it can enable the poor to escape the poverty trap are questions that remain largely unexplored. This study used data from the 2012 Rural Household Survey in China to investigate the impact of the rural Dibao programme on household expenditures. We found that the programme significantly improved the well‐being of low‐income households. Particularly, the programme significantly increased household expenditures on housing, education and health; furthermore, the impact was greater for households with educated household heads. However, the programme did not significantly affect household expenditures on food, transportation or farming inputs. The results imply that participation in the rural Dibao programme induces household investment in human capital, which could help to break the inter‐generational transmission of poverty and raise long‐run welfare.     

Linking taxation and social protection: Evidence on redistribution and poverty reduction in Ethiopia

Although redistribution results from the simultaneous effects of taxes and transfers, analyses of their distributional effects in low‐income countries have largely been undertaken from singular perspectives. This article jointly assesses the distributional effect of taxes and transfers (through social protection) using Ethiopia as a case study. We find that Ethiopia's flagship social protection programme is more effective than income taxation in achieving poverty reduction, while neither policy achieves a sizeable reduction in overall inequality. We also find that Ethiopia does not currently have the capacity to close the poverty gap or to fully fund its main safety net programme using domestic income sources alone.     

Poverty‐aware social work practice: service users' perspectives

In recent years, there has been an increase in scholarly writing on the theory and practice of critical social work with people living in poverty. Yet there is a lack of research on the experiences and perspectives of service users regarding this kind of practice. This paper presents a qualitative study that explored the practice of a special poverty‐aware social work programme in Israel, through the experiences of women who took part in it. Using an interpretative interactionist approach, in‐depth interviews with nine women were held three times over a 2‐year period. Findings reveal a high degree of satisfaction with the programme on the part of the women. The satisfaction was derived from four main experiences: the experience of visibility, the experience of the active partnership in the fight against poverty, the experience of close, hierarchy‐challenging relationships, and the experience of responsiveness to material and emotional needs. The findings are discussed in terms of three principles of practice: intervention in a real‐life context, relationship‐based intervention and the focus on both the material and emotional needs and their fulfilment.     

The emergence of social assistance in China

This article outlines the development of China's social assistance programme, including its design, implementation and trends. The Chinese government has given high priority to the establishment and institutionalisation of this programme. To have an effective social assistance programme in the context of an increasingly pluralistic society, China is facing the profoundly challenging task of designing a coherent and over-arching social protection system that would cover retirement, medical care, unemployment and poverty alleviation.     

Mothers at the Service of the New Poverty Agenda: Progresa/Oportunidades, Mexico's Conditional Transfer Programme

This article considers some of the changes and continuities in social protection in Latin America through a focus on the ways in which motherhood is positioned as key to the success of the new anti‐poverty programmes that have followed structural reform. It examines a flagship cash transfer programme known as Progresa/Oportunidades (Opportunities) established in Mexico in 1997 and now being widely adopted in the region. Characterized by some commentators as a quintessentially neo‐liberal programme, it is argued that Oportunidades represents a novel combination of earlier maternalist social policy approaches with the conditional, co‐responsibility models associated with the recent approaches to social welfare and poverty relief endorsed by international policy actors. In the first section, the gendered assumptions that have governed Latin American social policy are described; the second outlines social policy provision in Latin America and identifies the key elements of the new approaches to poverty; and the third critically examines the broader implications of the Mexican programme's selective and gendered construction of social need premised, as it is, on re‐traditionalizing gendered roles and responsibilities.     

The breadth and depth of multidimensional child poverty in China

This study analysed the multidimensional child poverty status in China between 1989 and 2009, using the China Health and Nutrition survey data. Based on the Alkire–Foster method for measuring poverty, a multidimensional poverty index was calculated and further decomposed into seven deprivation dimensions: nutrition, water, sanitation, health, education, shelter and information. The study has four main findings: (1) The multidimensional child poverty rate in China declined gradually where the sanitation facility was most severely deprived; (2) The poverty gap between rich and poor provinces remained over the years; (3) The urban–rural disparity was reduced in all seven dimensions; (4) The poorest of the poor climbed out of ultra‐poverty and became the moderately poor or even the non‐poor.     

Trapped in poverty? A study of the dibao programme in Shanghai

As the secondary means of income redistribution in Chinese society (the primary means being taxation), the Minimum Living Standard Guarantee (MLSG) programme or dibao has been the object of both praise and criticism. The programme helps the government to channel its limited financial resources to the persons who need it most. While it covers the necessities of life, however, it does not enable its recipients to escape from poverty. It has also been criticized for its exorbitant administrative costs and heavy workload. This study uses a qualitative longitudinal design to identify changes across interview intervals and uncover the internal dynamics of the dibao programme. The research findings enrich the current literature on social assistance in China. Forty households receiving dibao in Shanghai were interviewed. Our findings show that most dibao recipients are laid-off workers – casualties of the massive economic reforms of the 1990s – and the younger members of their families. The assistance they receive helps with their daily expenses, but is insufficient to raise them out of poverty.     

Living on the edge: welfare and the urban poor in 1930s Beijing

This article examines poverty and welfare provision in early twentieth-century Beijing as dialogue and transaction between the city government and the urban poor. Earlier studies of the Chinese urban have tended to emphasize the material aspects of urban development, and the efforts of planners and city governments to modernize China’s cities, rather than the human experience of the city. This article draws on the extensive archives of the Beijing Municipal Government Social Affairs Bureau to extend our understanding of the experience of poverty and the agency of the poor. The archive confirms that Beijing’s growing and increasingly formalized welfare institutions were designed to discipline the poor as they alleviated poverty. However, the correspondence between applicants for welfare and the Social Affairs Bureau also reveals that the poor often approached these institutions instrumentally and assertively. Recourse to the welfare institute became a livelihood tactic, a claim on the authorities in pursuit of which certain sub-groups within the poor mobilized intangible assets, from social networks to understanding of the intended terms of the system, to sway the terms of their engagement with the authorities in their own favour.     

From Social Insurance to Social Assistance

In attempting to establish a social security system that would function to smooth the transition from a planned to market economy, the government of China has, for most of the time in the past decades, focused its efforts on setting up social insurance programs in the urban areas. Along with the emergence of urban poverty since the mid 1990s, the emphasis of the government has shifted to means-tested social assistance programs as the major means to combat poverty and maintain social stability. However, with the absence of more equitable social and economic policies that can protect people against the many risks associated with a market economy, the role of social assistance is very limited.     

Beyond poverty reduction: Conditional cash transfers and citizenship in Ghana

Ghana's Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme provides conditional cash transfers to poor households in deprived communities. Beyond the potentiality of the LEAP programme to reduce poverty, its implications for shaping state–citizen relations and inclusive citizenship have been largely ignored. This study explored the implications of the programme on notions of citizenship among cash recipients. The findings indicate that the programme generates interfaces that strengthen state–citizen interaction and serves as a promising avenue for reintegration. However, it is also characterised by undue delay in cash payment and weak institutional capacity to mediate interactive processes and grievances, which suggests that the contractual relationship and the state's accountability are weak. Furthermore, the programme has negatively influenced community social relations, limiting the forms of agency beneficiaries exercised. The study concludes that although LEAP represents a landmark in Ghana's quest for inclusive citizenship, it undermines social relations and citizens’ rights to hold the state accountable, which unavoidably limits effective state building.     

Discourse change and policy development in social assistance in China

Zhang H. Discourse change and policy development in social assistance in China Since the introduction of a new social assistance programme in urban China, the state was eventually able to expand the programme to rural areas as a further step towards integrating the development of social assistance in urban and rural areas. This article argues that the development of social assistance in China can be explained by the change of discourse among the officials and the elites in central government. The discourse on social assistance can be conceptualised in three periods: the urban‐first discourse (1999–2003); the discourse debate (2003–2007); and the urban–rural integration discourse (2007–present). Through scrutinising specific discourses and the policy development of social assistance in these three periods, it appears that in company with the change in the discourse process, rural social assistance was developed rapidly in order to construct an integrated social assistance system. The article concludes that discourse plays a significant role in Chinese social assistance policy development.     

Poverty eradication programs in Indonesia: Progress,challenges and reforms

This study explores the progress of and the challenges to poverty eradication programs in Indonesia by analyzing various social assistance programs and subsidies. Earlier poverty eradication programs such as food-based assistance and energy subsidies were only designed to increase households’ purchasing power. Later, the government also developed more advanced programs, such as conditional cash transfer, school assistance, and health insurance contribution assistance, to address long-run poverty by improving human capital quality. Common challenges of the existing programs remain, including inaccurate target the poor and lack of complementarity between programs. An exercise using a dynamic Computable General Equilibrium model shows that integrating programs into the conditional cash transfer reduces poverty further in rural and urban areas.     

The United States: welfare, work and development

It has long been claimed that social welfare programmes harm economic development. These programmes, it is alleged, depress work incentives, divert scarce investment resources to 'unproductive' social services and create a large underclass of dependent individuals. Welfare reform in the United States intends to reverse these allegedly negative economic effects by requiring welfare clients to work. It also hopes to reduce poverty. This article examines these claims. It discusses the welfare reform programme and concludes that its impact on both economic development and poverty has been minimal. Policies that transcend the current obsession with work, promote sustained economic development and invest in human capabilities are more likely to succeed.     

Local approaches to counter a wider pattern? Urban poverty in Portland,Oregon

A model U.S. city, Portland Oregon's progressive policies are often credited with making it highly livable, with a vibrant urban core. Yet these policies have not protected Portland from broader trends that have increased urban poverty over the past several decades in the U.S., including social welfare cuts and the shift in the economy to the service sector. In terms of poverty dynamics and social policies, we argue that while regional planning and other progressive policies have helped protect Portland from extremely high concentrated poverty present in many large U.S. cities, it has still experienced growing social dislocations associated with national and macro-level social and economic factors. These trends suggest both the possibilities and limits of local policy, regional planning, and activism for ameliorating the deleterious consequences of social welfare retrenchment and franchise capitalism for vulnerable urban populations, and highlight the importance of the broader social policy context and economic change for understanding urban poverty and the experiences of the urban poor.     

Contradictory Logics in Asset‐building Discourse: Habits,Identities and Discipline

Asset‐building as an anti‐poverty policy emphasizes helping the poor to save and accumulate wealth so as to promote future financial well‐being. This article focuses on how asset‐building discourse is practiced at the frontlines and its implications for how workers come to address issues of poverty. Drawing on qualitative data from a case study of a matched savings programme in the USA, the study finds that asset‐building discourse as enacted by workers is fundamentally contradictory: it promotes the idea that the poor can acquire financial literacy, but simultaneously works to discipline the poor to thoughtlessly save out of habit. More priority is placed on inculcating the habit of saving rather than teaching economically rational decision‐making. These findings indicate that asset‐building is consistent with a neo‐liberal outlook that focuses on disciplining the poor to be market compliant irrespective of whether their participation in market‐based activities effectively addresses the challenges of living in poverty.     

Poverty assessment as a multidimensional socio-economic concept: the case of the Rawalpindi region in Pakistan

The definition on poverty has progressed into a multidimensional concept focusing more on socio-economic dimensions than being a mere measure of financial deprivation. Corresponding to this advancement, this study investigated the incidence of multidimensional poverty (MDP) in the Rawalpindi region of Pakistan, taking into account three dimensions, i.e. education, health and housing. Findings revealed an inconsistent declining trend of MDP over time. This inconsistency was mainly attributed to observed fluctuations in deprivation levels of education, health and housing in the region. Over time, education deprivation showed a significant net increase. Notably, the magnitude of MDP in rural areas was higher than in urban areas.     

浅析人口城市化与城市社会问题

目前,我国已经进入到城市化快速发展的阶段。随着城市经济的发展以及人口的迅速增长,城市贫困、社会分化、心理失调、以及环境污染等城市社会问题也逐渐浮现,而有效的缓解以上问题是城市的建设者与管理者必须要面对的解决的。