3.5 Empirical Findings 853.5.1 Data 85; 3.5.2 Descriptive Statistics 90; 3.5.3 Method 95; 3.5.4 Regression Results 98; 3.6 Conclusion 111.

What circumstances or behaviors turn poverty into a cycle that perpetuates across generations? The answer to this question carries especially important implications for the design and evaluation of policies and projects intended to reduce poverty. Yet a major challenge analysts and policymakers face in understanding poverty traps is the sheer number of mechanisms—not just financial, but also environmental, physical, and psychological—that may contribute to the persistence of poverty all over the world. The research in this volume explores the hypothesis that poverty is self-reinforcing because the equilibrium behaviors of the poor perpetuate low standards of living. Contributions explore the dynamic, complex processes by which households accumulate assets and increase their productivity and earnings potential, as well as the conditions under which some individuals, groups, and economies struggle to escape poverty. Investigating the full range of phenomena that combine to generate poverty traps—gleaned from behavioral, health, and resource economics as well as the sociology, psychology, and environmental literatures—chapters in this volume also present new evidence that highlights both the insights and the limits of a poverty trap lens. The framework introduced in this volume provides a robust platform for studying well-being dynamics in developing economies.

Progressive-era "poverty warriors" cast poverty in America as a problem of unemployment, low wages, labor exploitation, and political disfranchisement. In the 1990s, policy specialists made "dependency" the issue and crafted incentives to get people off welfare. Poverty Knowledge gives the first comprehensive historical account of the thinking behind these very different views of "the poverty problem," in a century-spanning inquiry into the politics, institutions, ideologies, and social science that shaped poverty research and policy. Alice O'Connor chronicles a transformation in the study of poverty, from a reform-minded inquiry into the political economy of industrial capitalism to a detached, highly technical analysis of the demographic and behavioral characteristics of the poor. Along the way, she uncovers the origins of several controversial concepts, including the "culture of poverty" and the "underclass." She shows how such notions emerged not only from trends within the social sciences, but from the central preoccupations of twentieth-century American liberalism: economic growth, the Cold War against communism, the changing fortunes of the welfare state, and the enduring racial divide. The book details important changes in the politics and organization as well as the substance of poverty knowledge. Tracing the genesis of a still-thriving poverty research industry from its roots in the War on Poverty, it demonstrates how research agendas were subsequently influenced by an emerging obsession with welfare reform. Over the course of the twentieth century, O'Connor shows, the study of poverty became more about altering individual behavior and less about addressing structural inequality. The consequences of this steady narrowing of focus came to the fore in the 1990s, when the nation's leading poverty experts helped to end "welfare as we know it." O'Connor shows just how far they had traveled from their field's original aims.

Using data from several countries, including Cote d'Ivoire, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, and Thailand, this book analyzes household survey data from developing countries and illustrates how such data can be used to cast light on a range of short-term and long-term policy issues.

This book provides a synthesis of some recent issues and an up-to-date treatment of some of the major important issues in distributional analysis that I have covered in my previous book Ethical Social Index Numbers, which was widely accepted by students, teachers, researchers and practitioners in the area. Wide coverage of on-going and advanced topics and their analytical, articulate and authoritative p- sentation make the book theoretically and methodologically quite contemporary and inclusive, and highly responsive to the practical problems of recent concern. Since many countries of the world are still characterized by high levels of income inequality, Chap. 1 analyzes the problems of income inequality measurement in detail. Poverty alleviation is an overriding goal of development and social policy. To formulate antipoverty policies, research on poverty has mostly focused on inco- based indices. In view of this, a substantive analysis of income-based poverty has been presented in Chap. 2. The subject of Chap. 3 is people’s perception about income inequality in terms of deprivation. Since polarization is of current concern to analysts and social decisi- makers, a discussion on polarization is presented in Chap. 4.

There are fewer people living in extreme poverty in the world today than 30 years ago. While that is an achievement, continuing progress for poor people is far from assured. Inequalities in access to key resources threaten to stall growth and poverty reduction in many places. The world's poorest have made only a small absolute gain over those 30 years. Progress has been slow against relative poverty as judged by the standards of the country and time one lives in, and a great many people in the world's emerging middle class remain vulnerable to falling back into poverty. The Economics of Poverty reviews critically past and present debates on poverty, spanning both rich and poor countries. The book provides an accessible new synthesis of current economic thinking on key questions: How is poverty measured? How much poverty is there? Why does poverty exist, and is it inevitable? What can be done to reduce poverty? Can it even be eliminated? The book does not assume that readers know economics already. Those new to the subject get a lot of help along the way in understanding its concepts and methods. Economics lives through its relevance to real world problems, and here the problem of poverty is both the central focus and a vehicle for learning.