Converging on Disaster: Climate Security and the Malthusian Anticipatory Regime for Africa

Malthus’s privileging of population growth as the main cause of poverty, scarcity and war still resonates widely in both the public policy arena and popular culture. It shapes dominant discourses about the relationship between climate change, conflict and security in Africa. This article examines what I call the Malthusian Anticipatory Regime for Africa (MARA). MARA represents the convergence of current international strategies for reducing high fertility in sub-Saharan Africa through long-acting female contraception with climate conflict narratives that blame environmental degradation on population pressure and portray young African men as a security threat. Together these serve as a powerful gendered rationale for Western humanitarian and military interventions. MARA also plays a role in justifying the new land enclosures on the continent. How can critical scholarship more effectively challenge MARA and intervene in the politics of anticipating the future?     

Unit-Consistent Poverty Indices

This paper characterizes unit-consistent poverty indices. The unit consistency axiom requires that poverty rankings (not poverty indices) remain unaffected when all incomes and the poverty lines are expressed in different measuring units. We consider two general frameworks of poverty measurement: the semi-individualistic framework that includes all decomposable indices and all rank-based indices; and the Dalton–Hagenaars framework that contains a subset of decomposable indices. Within the semi-individualistic framework, classes of unit-consistent poverty indices can be characterized for different value judgements about poverty measurement. Within the Dalton-Hagenaars framework, unit-consistent poverty indices are completely characterized without invoking any value judgement a priori. I thank Peter Lambert, Mike Hoy, Thesia Garner and an anonymous referee for their very helpful comments and suggestions.     

建国以来我国农村扶贫开发的历史回顾与现实启示

新中国成立后,根据不同时期农村贫困状况的不同特点,中国共产党采取了相应的扶贫政策和措施,从小规模的救济式扶贫,到以体制改革为主导的扶贫;从以"输血"为主的扶贫到以"造血"为主的扶贫再到综合性扶贫开发,取得了重要成效,并积累了许多宝贵经验,为新形势下进一步开展农村扶贫开发工作提供了重要启示。     

SEQUENTIAL STOCHASTIC DOMINANCE AND THE ROBUSTNESS OF POVERTY ORDERINGS

When comparing poverty across distributions, an analyst must select a poverty line to identify the poor, an equivalence scale to compare individuals from households of different compositions and sizes, and a poverty index to aggregate individual deprivation into an index of total poverty. A different choice of poverty line, poverty index or equivalence scale can of course reverse an initial poverty ordering. This paper develops easily-checked sequential stochastic dominance conditions that throw light on the robustness of poverty comparisons to these important measurement issues. These general conditions extend well-known results to any order of dominance, to the choice of individual versus family based aggregation, and to the estimation of "critical sets" of measurement assumptions. Our theoretical results are briefly illustrated using data for four countries drawn from the Luxembourg Income Study databases.     

中国的经济增长、贫困减少与政策选择

本文详细讨论了贫困分析常用的几个概念和衡量指标 ,并建立了它们之间的关系 ,从而建立起分析模型。进一步 ,本文提出了分解增长效应的方法和贫困减少指数 ,然后 ,本文将提出的模型、方法和指数应用于调查结果及其他官方资料 ,以分析 1 985年至 2 0 0 1年间增长与贫困减少的关系。实证结果与 1 985年以来中国贫困减少的经历相符。贫困减少指数表明 ,增长政策的选择应该使收入效应与不均等效应之和最大化 ,这为不同的发展阶段与不同的地区提供了政策选择。     

An Analysis of Poverty in the American South: How Are Metropolitan Areas Different from Nonmetropolitan Areas?

This article examines the causes of poverty in the American South and identifies differences in the causes that exist between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties. Using a multiple linear regression model, a county's poverty rate is regressed on a vector of variables related to characteristics of its population, educational attainment, and economy. This study finds that most of these characteristics affect a county's poverty rate, but it also finds that several of the characteristics have a significantly different effect on the poverty rate of metropolitan counties than on the poverty rate of nonmetropolitan counties. These differences suggests that policy makers involved in fighting poverty in metropolitan counties may need to focus their efforts on changing different characteristics of the county than those engaged in fighting poverty in nonmetropolitan counties. (JEL I30 , R10 )     

A methodology for measuring food poverty applied to Kenya

This paper proposes a new way of establishing a food poverty line taking into account regional food preferences and prices. It uses this poverty line to derive a food poverty measure which satisfies the desirable fundamental properties of such measures and has the additional advantage of being additively decomposable. The measurement of food poverty is further generalized to heterogeneous groups of households facing different sets of relative prices and exhibiting different food preferences. Finally, the above methodology is applied to the empirical estimation of food poverty among Kenyan smallholders, and the results contrasted with those obtained by two other methods.     

International Poverty Comparisons on Unit Record Data of Developing and Developed Countries

Cross country poverty comparisons on unit records have, rarely, involved both developing and developed countries. The present study attempts to fill this gap by comparing poverty across fourteen nations with diverse economic and demographic characteristics and at vastly different stages of economic development. The study contains evidence on (a) cross country variation in the equivalence scales estimated in the presence of both household size economies and adult/child relativities, (b) impact of demographic adjustment of the poverty line, that incorporate household size and composition changes, on the poverty rates, and (c) sensitivity of the poverty estimates and their rankings to the ‘equivalence elasticity’. The study finds that country rankings based on per capita GNP bear very little resemblance with that based on the aggregate poverty rates. The latter hide substantial variation in the poverty estimates across different household types.     

Income Mobility, Temporary and Permanent Poverty

This paper incorporates poverty persistence in a measure of aggreg ate poverty over two-periods by decomposing the Foster et al . (1984) class of poverty measures into those temporarily in poverty and those in poverty in both periods. An additional weight is added to the permanent component in forming an aggregate poverty measure over both periods; this weight reflects the degree of poverty-persistence aversion. The effect on aggregate poverty of mobility between permanent and temporary poverty is found to be unambiguous only in the case of the headcount poverty measure. Simulations are used to investigate the relationship between poverty and mobility. The effects of two different types of mobility (random proportio nal income changes and a systematic regression towards or away from the median) are isolated     

中国老年家庭的经济脆弱性与贫困

利用中国健康与营养调查(CHNS)2006和2009年的面板数据测度了老年家庭的经济脆弱性,检验各因素对经济脆弱性和贫困的相对影响力。老年家庭的经济脆弱性高于贫困;户主特征和家庭变量不同程度地影响到了经济脆弱性及贫困,代际间向上流动的私人转移支付对老年家庭的经济脆弱性和贫困没有作用;超过24%的非贫困家庭是经济脆弱性家庭;期望效用的脆弱性(VEU)方法表明,不平等虽然减少了脆弱性,但其影响经济脆弱性的力量最小,不可解释的风险是最重要的因素,异质性风险和协同性风险的力量居中。     

Poverty risk of the unemployed in six European countries: why is it higher in some countries than in others?

In all European countries unemployed persons face a high risk of relative poverty, but poverty rates vary greatly among EU countries. We analyse to what extent these differences could be explained by a different composition of the unemployed or by differences in the national income distribution functions. Our results indicate that the effects of individual characteristics on the poverty risk are roughly comparable between countries, but the composition of the unemployed is very different, which explains on average half of the cross-country differences in poverty rates.     

Assessment of the effects of targeted poverty alleviation policy on differently poverty-stricken households: A multi-propensity score weighting model

Eliminating poverty is a multifaceted global challenge and a focal point of global development governance. With the implementation of targeted poverty alleviation (TPA), China's poverty alleviation efforts have had significant achievements. This study provides a new perspective by classifying poverty-stricken households based on poverty root causes at the household level, a multi-propensity score weighting model based on counterfactual inference is employed to examine the poverty reduction effect and policy precision on six non-equivalent poverty-stricken household groups in a Chinese county. The results reveal that the poverty reduction effects differed among poverty-stricken households with different root causes of poverty. Specifically, households impoverished due to disability have the lowest income of the six groups. The assistance policy effects also vary significantly and are found to be poorly suited to poverty-stricken households a lack of labor force and funds. A robustness test confirms this conclusion and a more nuanced analysis reveals that these differences are reflected in the wage and transfer incomes. Therefore, to ensure the stability of poverty reduction and the sustainability of income for poverty-stricken households, relevant associated aid policies need to place different emphases based on their household characteristics.     

经济增长、产业结构与农村减贫——基于省际面板数据的实证分析

在经济增长与减贫关系问题上,大量的实证研究仅仅用经济增长以及伴随增长过程的收入分配状态作为解释变量,其结论与现实的契合性不够稳定。通过在计量模型中加入产业结构、农业生产条件、农业扶贫与发展政策等关键性的中间变量,并采用跨越"八七扶贫攻坚"期间和新世纪"农村扶贫开发"两个发展时期的省际面板数据,实证分析表明经济增长在农村减贫中具有重要地位,城乡收入差距扩大对农村减贫具有显著的负效应。与现有的大量实证研究结论不同,本研究表明不同产业在经济发展的不同阶段对农村减贫的影响是不同的,三次产业发展对农村贫困的影响发生了一定程度的逆转。因此,新时期反贫困战略也应做出相应的调整。     

RECKONING INTER-GROUP POVERTY DIFFERENTIALS IN THE MEASUREMENT OF AGGREGATE POVERTY

Abstract.  It is plausible that the extent of measured aggregate poverty should depend upon the distribution of poverty across a population's subgroups. The aggregate measure of poverty would then lend itself to 'penal adjustment' to reflect the extent of inter-group disparity in the distribution of poverty. In the present paper, this approach to poverty measurement is examined by advancing a diagrammatic aid to analysis called the group poverty profile. The latter is a virtual transplantation, to the present context, of the notion of a deprivation profile that has been explored and analysed by Shorrocks (1996 ) in a different context.     

HETEROGENEITY OR TRUE STATE DEPENDENCE IN POVERTY: THE TALE TOLD BY TWINS

The purpose of this study is to distinguish between two different reasons that poverty could persist on an individual level. This study takes advantage of the similarity within pairs of identical twins to separate family‐specific heterogeneity from true state dependence, where the experience of poverty leads to a higher risk of future poverty. The results, based on a four‐variate probit model, show the importance of true state dependence in poverty. When using a poverty measure based on disposable income, family‐specific heterogeneity explains between 21 and 25 percent of poverty persistence in the Swedish sample of twins.     

生命周期视角下收入主导型多维贫困的识别与成因分析

本文根据我国扶贫政策的目标构建了“收入主导型”的多维贫困识别指标，并对成人和儿童设置了差异化的多维贫困识别标准，以此为基础运用CFPS数据度量了我国多维贫困的程度，最后进一步探究多维贫困产生的原因。有74%的儿童存在至少一个维度上的贫困。儿童的多维贫困程度比成人严重，儿童健康和教育维度贫困率都在20%左右，亟须从生命周期视角下构建精准扶贫政策体系。对多维贫困影响因素的分析结果显示，人力资本因素、家庭负债情况等因素影响显著，折射出教育扶贫、金融扶贫等政策的必要性和紧迫性。     

Equity-regarding poverty measures: differences in needs and the role of equivalence scales

Abstract .  The paper investigates the definition of equity-regarding poverty measures when there are different household types in the population. It demonstrates the implications of a between-type regressive transfer principle for poverty measures, for the choice of poverty lines, and for the measurement of living standard. The role of equivalence scales, which are popular in empirical work on poverty measurement, is clarified.     

Poverty growth in Scandinavian countries: A Sen multi-decomposition

We show in this paper that the growth rate of the Sen index is multi-decomposable, that is, decomposable simultaneously by subgroups and income sources. The multi-decomposition of the poverty growth yields respectively: the growth rate of the poverty incidence (poverty rate) decomposed by subgroups, the growth rate of the poverty depth (poverty gap ratios) decomposed by sources and subgroups, and the growth rate of inequality decomposed by sources and subgroups. We demonstrate that the multi-decomposition is not unique. It is mainly dependent on poverty lines defined on the space of income sources. An application to Scandinavian countries shows that poverty lines based on non-correlation between the income sources imply serious risks of underestimation of the contribution levels of the different components of the global poverty growth. The main contribution of our paper is to pay particular attention to the poverty growth and its source components in order to avoid underestimation of poverty growth.     

Spatial differences in poverty: The case of Peru

This paper examines the implications of spatial differences in living costs for measures of poverty. Taking Peru as a case study, spatial price indices are used to calculate location-specific poverty lines, based on the local cost of a basket of basic needs. Applied to income distribution data, these poverty lines yield measures of the extent and location of poverty. The paper shows that these measures are significantly different from, and much more accurate than those obtained using a single countrywide poverty line; the latter can give a misleading picture of poverty by over- stating spatial differences, in general overestimating rural and underestimating urban poverty.     

POVERTY, NON-WHITE POVERTY, AND THE SEN INDEX

This paper investigates the impact of economic growth, and more specifically robust economic growth along with other macroeconomic determinants, on poverty levels using both the U.S. official measure of poverty and an estimated time series of Sen indices of poverty. The results reveal that the period of robust economic expansion that the U.S. economy experienced during the 1990s did not have a significant impact on poverty using either measure. In addition, we find that the impact of growth and other macro controls is dramatically different when a subset of the poverty population, namely non-white poverty, is investigated. The percentage of households headed by women is shown to be a significant factor in examining poverty for this subgroup.