First published in 1998, this books considers defining the concept of poverty as a collective issue through an empitrical view point on an international scale. Looking to define ‘poverty’ by compiling case studies by academics writing from viewpoints in a variety of individual countries.

Poverty remains one of the greatest problems of our time, causing starvation and humiliation in poor countries and contributing to problems of conflict, migration and environmental degradationeffectingalso richer countries. This study provides a systematical analysis of today's donor strategies for development cooperation, which unite around the goal fo poverty reduction. The most recent strategies of the World Bank and the German, British and swedish official development agencies are compared and evaluated. Their broad consensus on goals and coneptual elements in comprehensively presented. Differences in accentuations regarding beneficiaries and implementationmethods are highlighted. An empirical study of the povery focus in project evaluations of he German Fonancial Cooperatin rounds off the analysis by exemplarily pointing at the practical implications of the new strategies. Contents: The consensus regarding poverty reduction strategies for developing countries--Defferences in the accentuations of various donors--Empirical result on poverty focus in project evaluations of the German Financial Cooperation.

An examination of the state of the art in stratification research, looking at data, methods, theory, and new empirical findings in social inequality, life course, and cross-national comparative sociology.

In contemporary European and American urban policy and politics and in academic research it is typically assumed that spatial concentrations of poor households and/or ethnic minority households will have negative effects upon the opportunities to improve the social conditions of those who are living in these concentrations. Since the level of concentration tends to be correlated with the level of spatial segregation the 'debate on segregation' is also linked to the social opportunity discussion. This book explores the central questions in urban and housing studies: Do poor neighbourhoods make their residents poorer? Does the neighbourhood structure exert an effect on the residents (behavioural, attitudinal, or psychological) even when controlling for individual characteristics of the residents? This issue has offered a locus for multi-disciplinary investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, and this volume demonstrates the rich geographical, sociological, economic and psychological dimensions of this issue. This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal Housing Studies.

The governments of 117 countries agreed at the World Summit on Social Development to prepare annual national anti-poverty plans. Two measures in particular were recommended for absolute and overall poverty. This book examines poverty in Europe within this agreed international framework.

Many policies in several Western European countries and the U.S. aim to counter spatial concentrations of deprivation and create more socio-economically mixed residential areas. Such policies are founded on the belief that neighbourhoods have a strong and independent effect upon the well-being and life-chances of individuals. The adequacy of the evidence base to support this position has been the subject of spirited debate on both sides of the Atlantic. The primary purpose of this book is to contribute to this policy-relevant discussion by presenting new scholarship from many countries that rigorously quantifies various sorts of neighbourhood effects through the use of cutting-edge social scientific techniques. The secondary purpose of this book is to introduce these techniques to a wider array of housing and planning researchers and to show how a variety of disciplines have offered insightful, synergistic perspectives. Research on neighbourhood effects has over the last 15 years led to a body of knowledge extending far beyond the sociological urban research where it originated. The problem of quantifying neighbourhood effects and the use of associated methodologies (like multi-level analysis, instrumental variables) has attracted scholars from criminology, sociology, social geography, economics and health science, and thus serves as a critical locus for interdisciplinary scholarship. This book was previously published as a special issue of Housing Studies.