Search Results
Since 1990, the World Bank, most of the other international agencies and an increasing number of governments have committed themselves to the eradication of poverty. But the basis of their work badly needs overhaul and concerted verification. Breadline Europe provides a scientific and international basis for the analysis and reduction of poverty. It demonstrates that there is far more important research into the problem of poverty going on in many countries of Europe than the international agencies and national governments admit or even realise. Knowledge of the major scientific advances in research needs to be spread among other countries within as well as outside Europe.
Breadline Europe has been written by a number of leading European poverty researchers and has three main themes: the need for a scientific poverty line: for better definition and measurement of what is the biggest and rapidly growing international social problem; the need for better theories distinguishing between poverty and social exclusion, with the corresponding policies calculated to diminish these problems;the need for better international social policy and for better policy-related analyses of poverty: for more exact analysis of the year-by-year contribution of specific policies to poverty.
This is the first book to examine poverty in Europe within the international framework agreed at the 1995 World Summit on Social Development. Breadline Europe provides up-to-date, essential reading for social science undergraduates and postgraduate students. It will also be of considerable interest to policy makers and NGOs with a concern for poverty reduction.
World poverty is an important book offering fresh insights into how to tackle poverty worldwide. With contributions from leading scholars in the field both internationally and in the UK, the book asks whether existing international and national policies are likely to succeed in reducing poverty across the world. It concludes that they are not and that a radically different international strategy is needed.
This book is a companion volume to Breadline Europe: The measurement of poverty (The Policy Press, 2001). The focus of World poverty is on anti-poverty policies rather than the scale, causes and measurement of poverty. A wide range of countries is discussed including countries such as China and India, which have rarely been covered elsewhere.
The interests of the industrialised and developing world are given equal attention and are analysed together. Policies intended to operate at different levels - international, regional, national and sub-national - ranging from the policies of international agencies like the UN and the World Bank through to national governments, groups of governments and local and city authorities - are examined. Key aspects of social policy, like ‘targeting’ and means-testing, de-regulation and privatisation, are considered in detail.
World poverty will become a definitive point of reference for anyone working, studying or researching in the poverty field.
Series Editor: David Gordon, Director, Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research.
Poverty, inequality and social exclusion remain the most fundamental problems that humanity faces in the 21st century. This exciting series, published in association with the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research at the University of Bristol, aims to make cutting-edge poverty related research more widely available.
For other titles in this series, please follow the series link from the main catalogue page.
The growing divide between the poor and the rich is the most significant social change to have occurred during the last few decades. The new Labour government inherited a country more unequal than at any other time since the Second World War.
This book brings together a collection of contributions on inequalities in the main areas of British life: income, wealth, standard of living, employment, education, housing, crime and health.
It charts the extent of the growth in inequalities and offers a coherent critique of the new Labour government’s policies aimed at those tackling this crisis. In particular, the numerous area-based anti-poverty policies currently being pursued are unlikely to have a significant and long-lasting effect, since many lessons from the past have been ignored. The contributors use and interpret official data to show how statistics are often misused to obscure or distort the reality of inequality.
A range of alternative policies for reducing inequalities in Britain are discussed and set within the global context of the need for international action.
Tackling inequalities is a valuable contribution to the emerging policy debate written by the leading researchers in the field. It is essential reading for academics, policy makers, and students with an interest in inequalities, poverty and social exclusion.
Studies in poverty, inequality and social exclusion series
Series Editor: David Gordon, Director, Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research.
Poverty, inequality and social exclusion remain the most fundamental problems that humanity faces in the 21st century. This exciting series, published in association with the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research at the University of Bristol, aims to make cutting-edge poverty related research more widely available.
For other titles in this series, please follow the series link from the main catalogue page.
In 1995, agreement on Commitment 2 of the Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development committed the governments of 117 countries to:
… the goal of eradicating poverty in the world, through decisive national actions and international cooperation, as an ethical, social, political and economic imperative of humankind.
In order to differentiate it from overall poverty, the World Summit on Social Development defined absolute poverty in the following terms:
Absolute poverty is a condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to social services. (UN, 1995, p 57)
Overall poverty was defined by the World Summit in the following terms, to differentiate it from absolute poverty: Poverty has various manifestations, including lack of income and productive resources sufficient to ensure sustainable livelihoods; hunger and malnutrition; ill health; limited or lack of access to education and other basic services; increased morbidity and mortality from illness; homelessness and inadequate housing; unsafe environments; and social discrimination and exclusion. It is also characterised by a lack of participation in decision-making and in civil, social and cultural life. It occurs in all countries: as mass poverty in many developing countries, pockets of poverty amid wealth in developed countries, loss of livelihoods as a result of economic recession, sudden poverty as a result of disaster or conflict, the poverty of low-wage workers, and the utter destitution of people who fall outside family support systems, social institutions and safety nets.
Women bear a disproportionate burden of poverty and children growing up in poverty are often permanently disadvantaged. Older people, people with disabilities, indigenous people, refugees and internally displaced persons are also particularly vulnerable to poverty.
Poverty is a widely used and meaningful concept in all countries in the world. In September 2000, the governments of 189 countries adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration and resolved to “spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty”1.
Although poverty is a universal concept, its definition is often contested. The term ‘poverty’ can be considered to have a cluster of different overlapping meanings depending on the subject area or discourse (Gordon and Spicker, 1999). In the Poverty and Social Exclusion (PSE) Survey both poverty and social exclusion have been measured using a range of different definitions and techniques so that the results can be usefully compared with other work and a better scientific consensus developed.
The purpose of this chapter is twofold: first, to describe how the concept of poverty is defined; and second, to show how poverty is measured in the PSE Survey. It is divided into two main sections: (i) the definition of poverty; and (ii) the measurement of poverty in the PSE Survey.
Despite the UK government’s repeated commitment to halve child poverty by 2010 and eradicate child poverty by 2020 (see Chapter Eleven in this volume), there is still no official definition of poverty in the UK. Indeed, in the past, ministers have often defined poverty by ‘knowing it when they see it’.
The first of the annual Opportunity for All (OFA) reports in 1999 on tackling poverty and social exclusion defined poverty as follows:
Poverty affects different aspects of people’s lives, existing when people are denied opportunities to work, to learn, to live healthy and fulfilling lives, and to live out their retirement years in security.
All politicians from all political parties in the UK agree that poverty is ‘bad’ things which should be reduced/eradicated.There is political unanimity about this, however, there is also often passionate contestation about the causes and solutions to poverty and, in particular, who is to blame for poverty. This chapter both describes the Poverty and Social Exclusion project’ methodological approach and draws on over 200 years of poverty research to reach the following conclusions: 1) Poverty is not behaviour – most poverty has a structural cause; 2) Poverty is not a disease – you cannot catch poverty from your parents nor transmit it to your friends, relatives or children; 3) The underclass is a persistent myth – which has never existed; 4) Redistribution is the only solution to child poverty – only adults can provide the resources that children need. Failure to learn these lessons from research invariably results in ineffective and inefficient anti-poverty policies such as the £1 billion Troubled Families programme.
This chapter describes how international social policy and academic research on poverty have changed in the last decade and, in particular, how a widening chasm is developing between the anti-poverty policies being advocated by UN agencies and those of the EU. Having outlined these two sets of policies, the discussion explains that they are underpinned by a diverging approach to the measurement of poverty. It compares in detail the numbers living in poverty in different countries, criticises the poverty measures as well as the anti-poverty policies of the international financial agencies, and calls for a fresh international and scientific approach.
This chapter considers the most glaring inequalities in society: those relating to income, wealth, and standard of living. After consideration of the problems and common confusions surrounding definitional issues, and using a range of statistical sources, the discussion shows just how unequal British society had become by the time New Labour took office. It argues that a redistribution of income and wealth from the poor to the rich took place under the previous Conservative governments – reversing the trend from the fifteenth century onwards towards greater equality. The chapter proposes that in addition to the minimum wage, New Labour should introduce the maximum wage and wealth taxes as effective measures to reverse the rising trend of inequality.
This chapter is focused on the policy and philosophy of distributional justice in relation to children in the UK. It begins by studying the political philosophy that supports present government policies for children, most especially equality and anti-poverty policies. It is followed by a review of the limited political and economic philosophy literature on distributional justice for children. The discussion in this chapter is child-centred, and it examines the justice of relationships between children, as well as between children and adults.
This book is the most authoritative study of poverty and social exclusion in Britain at the start of the 21st century. It reports on the most comprehensive survey of poverty and social exclusion, ever to be undertaken in Britain: The Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey. This enormously rich data set records levels of poverty not just in terms of income and wealth but by including information about the goods and services which the British public say are necessary to avoid poverty.
The relationship between poverty and factors such as age, gender and paid work are explored, as well as other social issues such as crime and neighbourhood disadvantage.
Poverty and social exclusion in Britain charts the extent and nature of material and social deprivation and exclusion in Britain at the end of the 20th century; makes the first ever measurement of the extent of social exclusion based on a survey specifically designed for this purpose and provides a clear conceptual understanding of poverty and social exclusion from both an national and international perspective.
This important book should be read by officials and policy makers in national and local government, NGOs, charities and voluntary organisations dealing with poverty and social exclusion. It will also be required reading for academics and students of social policy, sociology, public health, economics and politics.
