Income growth and future poverty rates of the aged

This article estimates the effects of 50 years of steady growth in incomes on poverty rates among the elderly. It assumes that the poverty threshold continues to be adjusted for inflation but not for increases in real incomes. Simulations with the March 1998 Current Population Survey indicate that if the benefit rules for Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) are not changed and if earnings and other sources of income in an otherwise unchanging population grow by 1 percent per year (the intermediate assumption about earnings growth used in the Social Security Trustees' Report), poverty among the elderly will decrease from 10.5 percent in 1997 to about 7.2 percent in 2020 and to 4.1 percent in 2047. These projected poverty rates are quite sensitive to both the assumption about earnings growth and the assumption that benefits are not further reduced to maintain solvency. This article quantifies the sensitivity of the results to these assumptions and discusses several other aspects that might affect future poverty rates--changes in other income components like SSI, earnings, and pensions; changes in longevity and marital patterns; and changes in the distribution of earnings.     

Assessing the economic status of the aged and nonaged using alternative income-wealth measures

This exploratory article examines several aspects of the complex problem of combining data on income and wealth into a single measure of economic well-being. Examples of income-wealth measures that have been used are described. Estimates of the economic well-being of age groups in the current period are presented for several measures. To examine the sensitivity of the results to the choice of method, those estimates are compared. In this article, wealth is defined to include only financial assets. Data from the 1984 Survey of Income and Program Participation are used. The economic status of the aged relative to the nonaged improves when the measure of resources is changed from income to a combined income-wealth measure. The amount of improvement depends on the income-wealth measure used. When medians are examined, the differences among most of the measures compared are not very large. For every measure compared, the median rises as age increases, then falls. When the percentage of each age group that is in the bottom of the distribution is examined for several income-wealth measures, the differences among measures are small. In general, these percentages are relatively high for the young and old age groups, and relatively low for the middle age groups.     

The production of poverty

The idea of cultural resistance has been taken up in combative analysis of metropolitan racist situations. It is a legacy from analyses by combatants in anti-colonial struggles. Fanon's were among the most searching of such analyses. His writings indicate an unusual concept of culture and of a people. The concept is at the same time of a political subject and of a the formation and direction of psychic energies. What he wrote on violence and counter-violence should not be abstracted from his concepts of culture and its colonial situation. That situation as it is described in Fanon's writings and then the concept of culture and people are elaborated and then extended so that their application to metropolitan racism can be tried.     

A genealogy of the government of poverty

This paper contributes to a genealogy of the discourses and government of poverty. It offers a statement of what might be understood bya genealogical perspective and method, and then focuses on the emergence of a ‘liberal mode of government’ of poverty in the early nineteenth century, of which the reformed poor law in England is emblematic but not exhaustive. The emergence of this mode of government is followed through a series of related transformations of the older systems of the relief and administration of ‘the Poor’, best understood as a dimension of ‘police’ in its archaic sense. The conditions of the problematization of this older system of government in matters of population, economy, police, and so on. This emergence has implications for the formation of a national labour market, notions of self-governance and responsibility, forms of patriarchy and household, and issues of morality, philanthropy, admkinistration, and the state. Above all, it is within this liberal mode of government that we can witness both the constitution of poverty as a field of knowledge and invention, perhaps for the first time, and also the various surfaces of emergence for what will become ‘the social’. The implications of this liberal mode of government for our present are far from exhausted.     

Escaping poverty: behind the numbers

Head counts of poverty are the most commonly used indicator of poverty level. While not ideal, the analysis of poverty head counts informs conclusions about whether households move in or out of poverty over time. Longitudinal data from repeated surveys show that, at the country level, some countries have lifted their populations out of poverty, while the populations of other countries have either remained poor or become poorer. How these scenarios come to be is the key question that challenges the development community. What mix of country characteristics, policies, structural features and external influences conspire to either improve or deteriorate well-being and to affect overall poverty levels? Unfortunately, changes in poverty levels might sometimes be the result of changes in poverty measurement methodology, with no real change in the well-being of the population. For this reason, poverty assessment should begin with an analysis of the measurement methodology – particularly given the increased global enthusiasm for poverty reduction. This article examines panel data from Mongolia and the Philippines to show how seemingly slight variations in survey methodology can have a rather significant impact on poverty results. In order to make a robust comparison of poverty head counts from different surveys, the basic building blocks of the poverty measures must be identical. This is not always the case. Given the difficulties identified with money-metric head counts, this study concludes by arguing for a move beyond economic statistics, toward multidisciplinary approaches to poverty assessment. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Poverty spending and the poverty gap

This paper examines two questions basic to welfare policy: (1) whether the amount of poverty-related transfers is sufficient to fill the poverty gap, and (2) which families actually get benefits and how much of their income deficit is filled by those benefits. Transfers are sufficient: the post-Social Security poverty gap is $74 billion while poverty-related programs total $198 billion. Further, 86% of current income-conditioned benefits go to the pretransfer poor and 89% of those are used to alleviate poverty (fill the poverty gap). Thus, if a substantial fraction of total Federal and State expenditures on poverty-related programs could be targeted more toward the poor, the poverty gap can be eliminated. The current programs, however, would have to be changed substantially to achieve the necessary retargeting.     

A poverty of distinction

Homogenizing the poor, treating them as a shapeless blob, is not only dehumanizing but also makes them candidates for a single set of public policies. We propose to show, instead, using cultural theory, that there are different types of poor people, who follow different strategies in coping with or overcoming their condition.     

Alternative measures of economic success among TANF participants: Avoiding poverty,hardship, and dependence on public assistance

Current debates about the success of TANF reforms have been obscured by the use of inconsistent indicators of success, as well as by measurement difficulties associated with alternative indicators. This paper considers conceptual and measurement issues associated with three different indicators of economic well‐being: independence from public assistance, having income above the poverty threshold, and freedom from material hardship. Survey and administrative data from a sample of TANF participants illustrate the sensitivity of conclusions to alternative ways of measuring each indicator. Also considered is the extent to which dependence, poverty, and hardship coincide, or capture important differences in outcomes. The principles underlying TANF reforms have implications for appropriate measures of economic well‐being, as the empirical importance of these implications demonstrates. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Presidential address: How to improve poverty measurement in the United States

This paper discusses the reasons why the current official U.S. poverty measure is outdated and nonresponsive to many anti‐poverty initiatives. A variety of efforts to update and improve the statistic have failed, for political, technical, and institutional reasons. Meanwhile, the European Union is taking a very different approach to poverty measurement. The paper ends with four recommended steps that would allow the U.S. to improve its measurement of poverty and economic need.     

Decentralisation and poverty: conceptual framework and application to Uganda

In order to shed further light on the discussion about decentralisation‐poverty linkages in developing countries, this article introduces a conceptual framework for the relationship between decentralisation and poverty. The framework takes the form of an optimal scenario and indicates potential ways for an impact of decentralisation on poverty. Three different but interrelated channels are identified. Decentralisation is considered to affect poverty through providing opportunities for previously excluded people to participate in public decision‐making, through increasing efficiency in the provision of local public services due to an informational advantage of local governments over the central government and through granting autonomy to geographically separable conflict groups and entitling local bodies to resolve local‐level conflicts. Based on the experience with decentralisation in Uganda, it is shown that these channels are often not fully realised in practice. Different reasons are singled out for the Ugandan case, among them low levels of information about local government affairs, limited human capital and financial resources, restricted local autonomy, corruption and patronage, high administrative costs related with decentralisation and low downward accountability. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.