Tingri County Fights Poverty

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DOILUNGDEQUEN COUNTY:Farewell to Poverty

riendstoldmehowpeopleinDeqenTownship,DoilungdeqenCounty,hadfaredmuchbetterinthelasttwovears.butIstilldoubt-edit.Ivisitedthereseveraltimes,soIknewhowpoorthetownshipwas.Itshou1dhavemadesomeprogressinthelasttwoyears,butitshouldnothavebeenabletomakesomuchprog…     

GONGBO' GYAMDA COUNTY: Farewell to Poverty

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Does Agricultural Growth Matter in Poverty Alleviation?

This article uses a panel survey of households in the Indian state of Maharashtra to demonstrate that agricultural growth takes too long to trickle down to the rural poor. Unanticipated inflation, on the other hand, aggravates rural poverty, as does domination of the agricultural growth process by large landholders. This affects the poor through the oligopsonistic influence of the landholders in rural labour markets, dampening employment and wages (as compared with the outcome in a competitive market). In the context of structural adjustment, while the emphasis on allocative efficiency through withdrawal of input subsidies and remunerative prices for output is justified, acceleration in agricultural growth by itself is unlikely to make a dent in rural poverty. Measures designed to accelerate agricultural growth must therefore be supplemented by direct anti-poverty interventions. Consumer price stabilization is particularly important, and would be assisted by an overhaul of the Public Distribution System. Major reforms would include improved flexibility in the scale of the PDS, better targeting through alternative distribution networks when private trade channels are weak or non-existent, and simplification of registration procedures. The oligopsonistic role of large landholders could be curbed through market-mediated land redistribution, scrapping of all tenancy regulations when tenancy markets function efficiently, and through large-scale intervention in rural labour markets along the lines of the Employment Guarantee Scheme.     

Consistent and Transparent? The Problem of Longitudinal Poverty Records

The World Bank and leading donors have emphasized the importance of evidence‐based policy making in addressing entrenched poverty. Adoption of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers has also required establishing and updating poverty baselines, typically through Living Standards Measurement Surveys. Although the conceptual basis of these surveys has been questioned, little attention has been paid to whether frequent revisions to the longitudinal record have undermined their value. This article argues that changes to the poverty record have been sufficiently frequent and often sufficiently large to compromise the creation of a sound longitudinal poverty record. The lack of transparency also weakens national debate and ownership and undermines the construction of evidence‐based policy.     

Monetary and Multidimensional Child Poverty: A Contradiction in Terms?

Although the multidimensional nature of poverty is widely recognized, the extent to which monetary measures can serve as a proxy for non‐monetary measures remains unresolved. This is of particular concern for children given their dependence on others for fulfilment of basic needs and assumptions about intra‐household distribution that underpin monetary measures. This article adopts an innovative mixed‐methods approach to investigate child poverty overlap and mismatch in the low‐ and middle‐income countries of Ethiopia and Vietnam using secondary longitudinal survey data and primary qualitative data from adults and children. Findings indicate that monetary and multidimensional poverty are distinct constructs that are linked, but cannot serve as a proxy for one another. While the degree of dissonance depends on the types of indicators under consideration, poverty mismatch persists regardless of time, place and multidimensional measure under consideration.     

Whose Wealth Is It Anyway? Mozambique's Outstanding Economic Growth with Worsening Rural Poverty

Despite rapid economic growth and massive inflows of aid, rural poverty in Mozambique is worsening. Agricultural production and productivity have not increased in the last decade. Use of chemical fertilizers and other modern technology is at a low level and decreasing. The present development model emphasizes that the role of government and donors is to provide human capital and infrastructure, while the private sector is responsible for economic development and ending poverty. The most recent national surveys confirm what is being seen elsewhere in Africa — that this non‐interventionist strategy does not raise agricultural productivity or reduce poverty. While 80 per cent of Mozambique's population is engaged in agriculture, this sector contributes only 20 per cent of GDP. This suggests that investments in agriculture are likely to generate pro‐poor growth, both to rural and urban dwellers. This policy failure is increasingly recognized, but donors and government have invested too much political capital in the current policy to change easily.     

UNICEF ‘Child Poverty in Perspective’ Report: A View from the UK

In February 2007, UNICEF launched the latest in a series of reports comparing the conditions of young people's lives across the world's more industrialised countries. The report ranked the UK as the lowest of the countries investigated. We give a critical overview of the report, identifying its limitations as well as some of the trends it reveals. We also discuss the poor placing of the UK in relation to current broader political and public debates.     

Respectable Rags: Working-Class Poverty and the 1913–14 Southern Colorado Coal Strike

This article uses the events of the 1913–14 Southern Colorado Coal strike and the cooperative work of the Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project to explore emergent historical narratives of working-class poverty and the role they play in shaping contemporary ideologies and public policy. It uses clothing as an entrée into discussions of the deserving and undeserving poor, and asks how competing groups used dress in the context of the 1913–14 southern Colorado coal strike to fashion subjects in particular ways. In so doing, it demonstrates the ineffectiveness of either-or dichotomies of deserving and undeserving that still influence current public policy.     

The Violence of Poverty: Theology and Activism in an “Age of Austerity”

ABSTRACT

Faith groups are in the front line of the struggle to defeat poverty in breadline Britain. Given their roots in local communities Churches and Christian NGOs are well-placed to challenge economic policies that have resulted in the spiraling of food poverty, homelessness, personal debt and child poverty. By framing poverty as a political choice, a form of structural violence and systemic sin this paper brings peace studies and political theology into a constructive dialogue. In the face of ongoing “austerity” the paper demonstrates that poverty represents a clear and present danger to the social fabric of the UK and argues that only a re-imagined interdisciplinary theology of liberation can provide academics and activists with the tools needed to defeat systemic poverty and the cultural violence upon which it rests.     

“Poor White” Recollections and Artifact Reuse in Barbados: Considerations for Archaeologies of Poverty

Archaeologists regularly confront the material realities of economic inequality. This article contributes to a growing body of literature on the archaeology of poverty but challenges archaeologists to consider how such approaches are politically weighted and directly come to bear on how communities experience economic hardship in the present. Additionally, through a case study of a “poor white” tenantry in Barbados, this article suggests that material culture from sites associated with people of limited economic means necessitates alternative interpretive methods that combine archaeological, historical, and oral sources.     

World Class Aspirations,Urban Informality,and Poverty Politics: A North–South Comparison

Under the influence of the discourses and practices of global neoliberal urbanism, municipal administrations worldwide aspire to make their cities world class spaces, where informality is an anachronism and poverty can be made history. In this essay, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, San Francisco (California), and Seattle (Washington), we address the question of how a geographic relational poverty approach can help us understand, or at least expand ways of thinking about these processes by attending to urban informality and the politics of poverty. Informality, a pervasive feature of the global South and North, functions as a survival strategy whereby the monetarily poor can compensate for their lack of income through commoning. Market-driven, state underwritten urban development initiatives for housing those with wealth is limiting the conditions of possibility for the monetarily poor, and informality. This is compounded by emergent political discourses rendering informality as inappropriate, and the monetarily poor as undeserving of a right to the city. Yet long-standing more-than-capitalist and communal informal practices pursued by the urban poor remain effective and necessary survival strategies, supporting residents whose presence is necessary to the city and whose practices challenge capitalist norms.     

The Archaeology of Poverty and Human Dignity: Charity and the Work Ethic in a 1930s Depression Era Itinerant’s Camp on the Toowoomba Range Escarpment, Queensland

This paper outlines the ethnohistory and archaeology of a Great Depression camp for unemployed men, established at Toowoomba, Queensland, in 1932. The camp was self sufficient and highly ordered. We interpret the material signature of the camp as a symbol of main-stream middle-class Australian values. Thus the camp is also a material symbol of the work ethic central at this time to notions of human dignity, respect and the moral development of individuals. We conclude that the archaeology of the camp demonstrates a strong work ethic among the ‘inmates’ and a degree of visible charity enabled by the historical concept of the ‘deserving poor’.