国际社会的贫困理论与减贫战略研究

贫困是世界著名的3P问题之一。作为一种特定的社会经济现象,贫困是全球面临的共同难题。二次世界大战后至今,国际社会为减少及消除贫困做出了积极的贡献,并提出了如人类发展指数、人类贫困指数和千年发展目标这样的有关贫困的理论及国际减贫目标。本文从国际社会的角度出发,对贫困理论以及减贫战略进行了详细研究,并在国际社会制订减贫战略及政策方面提出了几点建议。     

To Work Oneself out of Poverty: The Dutch Experience 1989–96

This paper investigates the effect of finding work by one of the household members on the probability of escaping from poverty in the Netherlands. For households with non-active heads, finding work by the head of the household is the most important (investigated) event connected with exiting poverty, nearly a third of all poverty endings. However, finding a job by the head of the household does not guarantee one leaving poverty. In practice, the success rate yields 25 percent. A multivariate analysis shows that finding a job by the head of the household increases the chance of leaving poverty with 22 percent points. So, some exits from poverty are a result of other factors or are due to selectivity of the job-finders. This difference is much larger when partners or (adult) children find jobs.     

长期多维贫困、不平等与致贫因素

本文利用Alkire&Foster(2011)多维贫困测度方法和Foster(2009)的持续时间分析法,构建了长期多维贫困与平均贫困持续时间指数,以CHNS数据为样本从静态和动态双重视角分析了我国的长期多维贫困程度,并通过多层回归模型探讨了致贫的宏微观因素。研究发现:长期多维贫困指数不仅能测度家庭贫困程度,还能反映贫困家庭平均贫困持续时间;相比城市家庭,农村家庭长期多维贫困发生率更高,但随着贫困持续时间的延长,城乡贫困家庭的平均被剥夺深度出现了明显的逆转,城市贫困家庭的贫困程度相对于农村更为严重;户籍制度能解释城乡家庭长期多维贫困发生率差异的43%,且能解释城乡贫困家庭的贫困不平等程度的17%;家庭的户主特征、社会关系、人口规模与结构、户籍制度等因素对长期多维贫困发生率及不平等有显著影响。     

Geography and Poverty Traps

We test the view that the large differences in income levels we see across the world are due to differences in the intrinsic geography of each country against the alternative view that there are poverty traps. We reject simple geographic determinism in favor of a poverty trap model with high- and low-level equilibria. The high-level equilibrium state is found to be the same for all countries while income in the low-level equilibrium, and the probability of being in the high-level equilibrium, are greater in cool, coastal countries with high, year-round, rainfall.     

Poverty and Political Risk

The paper explains the negative correlation between developing countries' per capita incomes and measures of political risk by relating a government's decision to tax foreign investors to distributional interests in the host country's population. Using a dynamic general-equilibrium model in which agents make irreversible investments abroad to insure against country-specific technology shocks, it is shown that the political risk for foreign investors is prohibitive if the host country's initial per capita income is too low and if the benefits of international diversification are not high enough to generate a sufficiently strong opposition against discriminatory taxation.     

Poverty and Witch Killing

This study uses rainfall variation to estimate the impact of income shocks on murder in rural Tanzania. Extreme rainfall (drought or flood) leads to a large increase in the murder of „witches”—typically elderly women killed by relatives—but not other murders. The findings provide novel evidence on the role of income shocks in causing violent crime, and religious violence in particular.     

贫困的合理性与贫困救助过程中的负功能分析

转型期社会机制不完善,制度安排还不是很合理,贫困在社会中存在是普遍的,而且它的存在也有一定的合理性,但并不说明支持贫困的存在,不需要救助,只是贫困对社会的发展有一定的功能。而是说在救助过程中存在着违背初衷的现象,即贫困的社会救助中存在着负效应。例如,出现了贫困陷阱、福利依赖等现象。贫困问题的真正解决之道在于给贫困者“增能”,而非救助。     

Australian Poverty Quantified by a Family-Based Poverty Index*

We postulate a family-based poverty index (JD) possessing focus, symmetry, monotonicity and decomposability properties commonly required of individualistic indexes. JD also satisfies reformulated distribution and transfer sensitivity axioms which take account of differences between families in their sizes and poverty lines. We introduce a new axiom, substitution sensitivity, which is satisfied by JD but not by the well-known FGT index. Using JD, we describe Australian poverty in the 1980s. We find that head-count ratios and average income gaps dominate the explanation of differences in poverty across family types and across time. Differences in the distributions of poor incomes make minor contributions.     

Poverty alleviation and tax policy

This paper examines public good provision and tax policy—optimal non-linear income taxation and linear commodity taxation—when the government departs from purely welfarist objective function and seeks to minimise poverty. This assumption reflects much policy discussion and may help understand some divergences of practical tax policy from lessons in optimal tax analysis. In contrast to Atkinson and Stiglitz (J. Public Econom. 6 (1976) 55), it may be optimal to use differentiated commodity tax rates, including the taxation of savings, even if preferences are separable in goods and leisure. The optimal effective marginal tax rate at the bottom of the distribution may be negative, suggesting that wage subsidy schemes can be optimal. Finally, optimal provision of a public good is analysed under poverty minimisation.     

缓解贫困与人文关怀

贫困是人类共同面临的最古老的敌人。比起其他社会科学，经济学对贫困的解读要滞后一些，其研究历程在经过了古典经济学的自然结构、马克思经济学的制度批判和主流经济学的沉寂之后，开始注重贫困发生和缓解中的人文性、社会性、文化性等非经济因素分析与经济、技术因素的整合及运用。因此，破解亘古至今的贫困之谜，经济学必须张扬人文关怀的精神，这将对21世纪人类反贫困的制度安排、技术操作、组织构建和物质援助等方面产生重大而深远的影响。     

不平等、贫困与全球化

反全球化人士认为,世界上的不平等和贫困状况几十年来在不断加剧,一些国际组织有时也持这种观点。然而最新研究显示,从1950年代到1990年代末这段时期,情况并没有发生变化,或者还稍有好转。一项针对近两个世纪的长期研究可以使我们更好地理解不平等与贫困的演变,从而更准确地界定二者与全球化之间的关系。     

A Consistent Poverty Approach to Assessing the Sensitivity of Income Poverty Measures and Trends

This paper examines the sensitivity of estimates of income poverty rates and trends to variations in the poverty line and to whether or not certain households are included or excluded from the sample used to estimate poverty. The approach draws on the concept of consistent poverty, which has been used to identify those with incomes below the poverty line who also experience deprivation. Our approach involves excluding households with incomes below the poverty line if they report zero or negative income or are self‐employed, have expenditure well in excess of their income, have substantial wealth holdings, or if they do not report having experienced financial stress over the past year. The combined impact of all four exclusions is to reduce the half‐median income poverty rate from 9.9 per cent to 5.4 per cent, but also suggests that poverty increased by more over the decade to 2003–04 than the original estimates indicate.     

南京市残疾人教育发展现状及需求调查

对残疾人教育事业发展方面的调查研究不单是教育事业发展的需要,同时也对中国残疾人事业发展有着重大意义。本调查是作为2009年度江苏省高等学校大学生实践创新训练计划项目的一项课题内容,分别从南京市残疾人教育发展概况、残疾人教育需求、发展对策等几个方面进行了调查和思考。     

Budget Standards and the Poverty Line

This article reports some of the results from a recent study which, among other things, developed and costed low cost budgets for a range of Australian households. A budget standard represents what is needed, in terms of goods, services and activities, to achieve a particular standard of living and what that costs in a particular place and time. A low cost budget standard is one designed to meet basic needs at a frugal level while still allowing social and economic participation consistent with community expectations. The low cost budget standard estimates for households living in Sydney in February 1997 are somewhat higher than the Henderson poverty line, partly a reflection of the high cost of housing in Sydney, but also a consequence of the low cost standard itself being above a poverty standard. In spite of this, the budget standard relativities for different households provide an estimate of the relative needs of Australian households in the 1990s which could replace the current much-criticised equivalence scale.     

社会排斥、贫困和失业

本文主要分析了社会排斥、贫困和失业三者之间的关系,提出了社会排斥概念的三个要素：(1)相对性;(2)能动性;(3)动态性。在着重讨论了社会保障收入对社会排斥的影响以及雇主在劳动力市场上的作用之后,文章认为社会保障收入是重要的,不能取消社会保障收入项目。社会排斥不仅与失业有关,而且政府政策也可能影响社会排斥,有必要检验所有政策建议对提高社会融合的作用。