High's argument is based on long-term fieldwork in a village in Laos. The village was identified as poor and was the subject of multiple poverty reduction and development interventions. This book looks at how these policies were implemented on the ground, particularly at why such apparently beneficent interventions were received locally with suspicion and disillusionment, often ended in failure, and yet, despite this, were also able to recapture people's desires. High relates this to the ""post-rebellious"" moment in contemporary Laos, the force of aspirations among village residents and locally grounded understandings of the ambivalence of power. Shortlisted for the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies (EuroSEAS) Social Science Book Prize 2015

In 2011, the U.S. poverty rate was 15.0% -- 46.2 million persons were estimated as having income below the official poverty line. Neither the poverty rate nor the number of persons counted as poor differed statistically from a year earlier. Since 2006, when the poverty rate stood at 12.3%, marking its most recent low, the number of poor has grown by 9.7 million persons. The 46.2 million persons counted as poor in both 2011 and 2010 are the largest numbers counted in the measure's recorded history, which goes back as far as 1959. The 2011 poverty rate of 15.0%, statistically tied with the 2010 rate, is the highest seen in the past 18 years (1993). The increase in poverty since 2006 reflects the effects of the economic recession that began in December 2007. The level of poverty tends to follow the economic cycle quite closely, tending to rise when the economy is faltering and fall when the economy is in sustained growth. This most recent recession, which officially ended in June 2009, was the longest recorded (18 months) in the post-World War II period. Even as the economy recovers, poverty is expected to remain high, as poverty rates generally do not begin to fall until economic expansion is well underway. Given the depth and duration of the recession, and the projected slow recovery, it will likely take several years or more before poverty rates recede to their 2006 pre-recession level. This book examines poverty in the U.S. and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM).

Social work and poverty: A critical approach provides a timely review of the key issues facing social workers and service users in working together to combat poverty.First, it situates social work and poverty within a historical context, then analyses definitions and theories of poverty along with their importance in enabling anti-oppressive practice with service users. It goes on to evaluate the Welfare Reform Act 2012 in relation to the negative impact on service users and social workers alike. Key areas of social work and social care are covered with regard to the effects of poverty including, uniquely, access to food, obesity and problematic drug use. Finally the impacts of globalisation on social work and issues of poverty are explored. The book will be of interest to students, researchers and academics in social work and policy makers working in related areas.

We are on the eve of the deadline for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, that were promised and pledged in the year 2000 by 189 nations of the world. It was envisaged to overcome extreme poverty and multiple deprivations existing in the society. With barely less than three years left to reach 2015, it would be interesting to study if there is a growing equality of opportunity between people and among nations. This is an issue that now dominates every discourse on development debate in the third millennium. The pace of development has been accompanied by rising disparities within nations and between nations. The most significant of these being gender disparity. Despite a relentless struggle to equalize opportunities between women and men, the issue remains an unfinished agenda and eludes the much desired change. This book could not have come at a more appropriate time. This publication consisting of contributions across Central Asia and South Asia adds to the slender collection of literature in understanding the present challenges and concerns that grip these regions in achieving the millennium development goals by 2015. It highlights sharp gender inequalities and the barriers to social and economic development that grip the region. This book will be a great source of information in helping scholars and researchers and also will contribute significantly in framing policy recommendations by the concerned countries.

Freedom of poverty is a universal human prerogative and right. Hence the tackling of poverty in developing countries is a social obligation for governments, MNCs and MNOs at a national, intergovernmental and supra-national level especially with its institutionalisation within the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Tourism was a sector that was actively promoted by the above mentioned institutions in order to act as a catalyst for development and poverty reduction. Nevertheless in the course of times tourism did not deliver the expected result: poverty reduction. Hence this book embarks on exploring, by adopting a participatory approach to research, the extent to which the various controlling interests', external (development agencies) and internal (government institutions), dictate and influence tourism development in the ex-colonial geographical areas under investigation and their relationships with various community constituents - mainly those in the local communities at the grass-roots level.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called the Food Stamp Program) plays a vital role in the social safety net in the United States, providing almost $72 billion in benefits in 2011. An important measure of SNAP's effectiveness is the extent to which the program reduces poverty. Evaluations of antipoverty effect of safety net programs often focus on the rate of poverty. However, the poverty rate reflects only one aspect of the antipoverty effect of a safety net program, whether or not adding program benefits to a family's resources lifts them above the poverty threshold. This book examines SNAP's role in poverty reduction with a focus on increased food security.

Using the narratives of women who use(d) drugs, this account challenges popular understandings of Appalachia spread by such pundits as JD Vance by documenting how women, families, and communities cope with generational systems of oppression. Prescription opioids are associated with rising rates of overdose deaths and hepatitis C and HIV infection in the US, including in rural Central Appalachia. Yet there is a dearth of studies examining rural opioid use. RX Appalachia explores the gendered inequalities that situate women's encounters with substance abuse treatment as well as additional state interventions targeted at women who use drugs in one of the most impoverished regions in the US.

This original and topical book tells the untold stories of migrants' experiences of, and responses to, financial exclusion in London. Breaking important new ground, it offers an insight into migrants' lives which is often overlooked, yet is increasingly vital for their broader integration into advanced financialised societies. Adopting a holistic focus, Migrants and their Money investigates migrants' complex financial lives which extend far beyond remittance sending, exploring their banking, saving, credit and debt related practices. It highlights how migrants negotiate the complex financial landscape they encounter and the diverse formal and informal ways in which they manage their money in the financial capital of the world. Drawing upon a rich evidence base, this book will be of particular interest to academics, local authorities, policy makers and the financial services industry.

Most information about the incomes of people in Britain today, such as provided by official statistics, tells us how much inequality there is or how many poor people there are in a given year and compares those numbers with the corresponding statistics from the previous year. Missing from snapshot pictures like these is information about whether the people who were poor one year are the same people who are poor the following year; and the circumstances of those with middle-income or top-income origins are not tracked over time. This book fills in the missing information. The author likens Britain's income distribution to a multi-story apartment building with the numbers of residents on the different floors corresponding to the concentration of people at different income levels in any particular year. The poorest are in the basement, the richest are in the penthouse, and the majority somewhere in between. This book assesses how much movement there is between floors, the frequency of moves, whether the distance travelled has been changing over the last two decades, and whether basement dwellers ever reach the penthouse. Using the British Household Panel Survey, which has followed and interviewed the same people annually since 1991, it documents the patterns of income mobility and poverty dynamics in Britain, shows how they have changed over the last two decades, and explores the reasons why. It draws attention to the relationships between changes in income and changes in other aspects of people's lives - not only in their jobs, earnings, benefits, and credits, but also in the households within which they live (people marry and divorce; children are born). Trends over time are also related to changes in Britain's labour market and the reforms to the tax-benefit system introduced by the Labour government in the late-1990s.

For more than four decades, Hugh Segal has been one of the leading voices of progressive conservatism in Canada. A self-described Red Tory warrior who disdains "bootstrap" approaches to poverty, he has always promoted policies, especially a basic annual income, to help the most economically vulnerable. Why would a life-long Tory support something so radical? In this revealing memoir, Segal shares how his life and experiences brought him to this most unlikely of places, beginning with his childhood in a poor immigrant family in Montreal to his time as a chief of staff for Prime Minister Mulroney and to his more recent work as an advisor on a basic income pilot project for the Ontario Liberal government. This book is a passionate argument not only for why a basic annual income makes economic sense, but for why it is the right thing to do.

This volume examines the persistence of poverty - both rural and urban - in developing countries, and the response of local governments to the problem, exploring the roles of governments, NGOs, and CSOs in national and sub-national agenda-setting, policy-making, and poverty-reduction strategies. It brings together a rich variety of in-depth country and international studies, based on a combination of original data-collection and extensive research experience in developing countries. Taking a bottom-up and multi-dimensional perspective of poverty and well-being as the starting point, the authors develop a convincing set of arguments for putting the priorities of poor people first on any development agenda, thus carving out an undisputable role for local governance in interplay with higher-up governance actors and institutions.

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant provides grants to states for a wide range of benefits, services, and activities that address economic and social disadvantage for families with children. TANF is best known for funding state cash welfare programs for needy families with children, and it was created in the 1996 welfare reform law. This book discusses the potential role that the TANF block grant to states may play in mitigating the effects of the recession for poor families with children.

At a time when poor Americans are struggling to keep their jobs, homes and basic necessities for their families, it is crucial for the federal government to address the civil legal needs of these vulnerable people as a national priority. The Legal Services Corporation (LSC) is a private, non-profit, federally funded corporation that helps provide legal assistance to low-income people in non-criminal (i.e., civil) matters. The primary responsibility of the LSC is to manage and oversee the congressionally appropriated federal funds that it distributes in the form of grants to local legal service providers, which in turn give legal assistance to low-income clients in all 50 states. This book explores the Legal Services Corporation, its background and funding, and addresses government accountability and weaknesses of the program.

Unique in its approach and in the variety of methods and data employed, this book is the first of its kind to provide an in-depth evaluation of the financial system of Thailand, a proto-typical Asian developing economy. Using a wealth of primary source qualitative and quantitative data, including survey data collected by the author, it evaluates the impact of specific financial institutions, markets for credit and insurance, and government policies on growth, inequality, and poverty at the macro, regional, and village level in Thailand. Useful not only as a guide to the Thai economy but more importantly as a means of assessing the impact that financial institutions and policy variation can have at the macro- and micro-level, including the distribution of gains and losses, this book will be invaluable to academics and policymakers with an interest in development finance.

Head Start, Job Corps, Foster Grandparents, College Work-Study, VISTA, Community Action, and the Legal Services Corporation are familiar programs, but their tumultuous beginning has been largely forgotten. Conceived amid the daring idealism of the 1960s, these programs originated as weapons in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, an offensive spearheaded by a controversial new government agency. Within months, the Office of Economic Opportunity created an array of unconventional initiatives that empowered the poor, challenged the established order, and ultimately transformed the nation's attitudes toward poverty.
In Launching the War on Poverty, historian Michael L. Gillette weaves together oral history interviews with the architects of the Great Society's boldest experiment. Forty-nine former poverty warriors, including Sargent Shriver, Adam Yarmolinsky, and Lawrence F. O'Brien, recount this inside story of unprecedented governmental innovation. The interviews capture the excitement and heady optimism of Americans in the 1960s along with their conflicts and disillusionment.
This new edition of Launching the War on Poverty adds the voice of Lyndon Johnson to the story with excerpts from his recently-released White House telephone conversations. In these colorful and brutally candid conversations, LBJ exercises his full arsenal of presidential powers, political leverage, and legendary persuasiveness to win one of his most difficult legislative battles. The second edition also documents how the OEO's offspring survived their volatile origins to become broadly supported features of domestic policy.

The riveting story of control over the mobility of poor migrants, and how their movements shaped current perceptions of class and status in the United States Vagrants. Vagabonds. Hoboes. Identified by myriad names, the homeless and geographically mobile have been with us since the earliest periods of recorded history. In the early days of the United States, these poor migrants - consisting of everyone from work-seekers to runaway slaves - populated the roads and streets of major cities and towns. These individuals were a part of a social class whose geographical movements broke settlement laws, penal codes, and welfare policies. This book documents their travels and experiences across the Atlantic world, excavating their life stories from the records of criminal justice systems and relief organizations. Vagrants and Vagabonds examines the subsistence activities of the mobile poor, from migration to wage labor to petty theft, and how local and state municipal authorities criminalized these activities, prompting extensive punishment. Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan examines the intertwined legal constructions, experiences, and responses to these so-called "vagrants," arguing that we can glean important insights about poverty and class in this period by paying careful attention to mobility. This book charts why and how the itinerant poor were subject to imprisonment and forced migration, and considers the relationship between race and the right to movement and residence in the antebellum US. Ultimately, Vagrants and Vagabonds argues that poor migrants, the laws designed to curtail their movements, and the people charged with managing them, were central to shaping everything from the role of the state to contemporary conceptions of community to class and labor status, the spread of disease, and punishment in the early American republic.

In the three works contained in this volume, written in 1797-8, Bentham offers a detailed exposition of his plan for the reform of the English poor laws.
In "Pauper Management Improved'"and the closely related "Situation and Relief of the Poor" and "Outline of a work entitled Pauper Management Improved." Bentham proposes the provision of poor relief in 250 Panopticon Industry Houses, each accommodating 2,000 people, owned and managed by a joint-stock company, the National Charity Company. The dependent poor were to be occupied primarily in the production of their own subsistence, while the Company's viability depended on the indenture until the age of 21 of a rapidly expanding number of children, whose relative productivity would cross-subsidize the provision of relief to the sick and the elderly. Bentham presents his Principles of Management (all intended to unite interest with duty), proposes the provision of Appropriate Establishments for people with disabilities (intended to enhance their productivity, and thereby their life-chances), describes the educational syllabus to be provided to pauper children, and compares the relative strengths and weaknesses of public versus private provision of relief.
The volume contains an Editorial Introduction which explains the provenance of the text, and the method of presentation. The texts are fully annotated with textual and historical notes, and the volume is completed with detailed subject and name indices.

A billion people, roughly half of all city dwellers in the developing world, live in squatter settlements. The most famous of these settlements are the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, which have existed for more than half a century and continue to outpace the rest of the city in growth.
Janice Perlman's award-winning The Myth of Marginality was the first in-depth account of life in the favelas, and it is considered one of the most important books in global urban studies in the last 30 years. Now, in Favela, Perlman carries that story forward to the present. Re-interviewing many longtime favela residents whom she had first met in 1969--as well as their children and grandchildren--Perlman offers the only long-term perspective available on the favelados as they struggle for a better life. Perlman discovers that much has changed in three decades, but while educational levels have risen, democracy has replaced dictatorship, and material conditions have improved, many residents feel marginalized more than ever. The greatest change is the explosion of drug and arms trade and the high incidence of fatal violence that has resulted. Almost one in five people report that a member of their family has been a victim of homicide. Yet the greatest challenge of all is job creation--decent work for decent pay. If unemployment and under-paid employment are not addressed, she argues, all other efforts--from housing to policing to community development--will fail to resolve the fundamental issues.
A revealing study of the giant slums of Rio de Janeiro and of the vibrant communities of migrants who have risked everything to come to the city to provide more opportunities for their children, this bookyields insights that apply to the entire global South, from Mexico City to Cairo, and from Mumbai to Lagos. Favela offers a powerful, long-term look at one of the great challenges facing the modern world--perhaps the major challenge of the twenty-first century.

Emerging from a public colloquium on the criminalization of poverty, this volume critically interrogates how state and private practices have increasingly come to over-regulate people with severely limited economic resources, and understands this regulation as part of the dynamics of liberal capitalism.

"This is an angry and a hopeful book, and, like everything Dr. Farmer has written, it has both passion and authority. "Pathologies of Power is an eloquent plea for a working definition of human rights that would not neglect the most basic rights of all: food, shelter and health. This plea has special potency because it comes from Dr. Farmer, a person who has proven that the dream of universal and comprehensive human rights is possible, and who has brought food, shelter, health, and hope to some of the poorest people on this earth."--Tracy Kidder, author of "The Soul of a New Machine and "Home Town

"Farmer's brilliance and charisma leap from the pages of his book. He challenges us to face the urgent theoretical and political challenges of the twenty-first century by linking structural violence to embodied social suffering and in the process calls for a new definition of human rights. Once this book is out, we will no longer be able to remain complacently--or rather, complicitly--on the sidelines."--Philippe Bourgois, author of "In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

"A passionate critique of conventional biomedical ethics by one of the world's leading physician-anthropologists and public intellectuals. Farmer's on-the-ground analysis of the relentless march of the AIDS epidemic and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis among the imprisoned and the sick-poor of the world illuminates the pathologies of a world economy that has lost its soul."--Nancy Scheper-Hughes, author of "Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil

"In his compelling book, Farmer captures the central dilemma of our times--the increasing disparities of health and well-being within andamong societies. While all member countries of the United Nations denounce the gross violations of human rights perpetrated by those who torture, murder, or imprison without due process, the insidious violations of human rights due to structural violence involving the denial of economic opportunity, decent housing, or access to health care and education are commonly ignored. "Pathologies of Power makes a powerful case that our very humanity is threatened by our collective failure to end these abuses."--Robert S. Lawrence, President of Physicians for Human Rights and Edyth Schoenrich Professor of Preventive Medicine at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University

"Farmer has given us that most rare of books: one that opens both our minds and hearts. It stands as a model of engaged scholarship and an urgent call for social scientists to forsake their cushy disregard for human rights at home and abroad."--Loic Wacquant, author of Prisons of Poverty

"Paul Farmer is an original: a powerful writer, an insightful theorist, and a human rights activist on behalf of the health needs of some of the poorest and most excluded people on the planet. "Pathologies of Power brings together all his strengths, as a thinker and an activist. Every health worker, human rights teacher, and government official who seeks to improve the health status and life chances of their fellow human beings simply must read this book."--Michael Ignatieff, author of Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry

"Paul Farmer is a great doctor with massive experience working against the hardest of diseases in the most adverse circumstances, and at the same time he is a proficient and insightful anthropologist.Farmer's knowledge of maladies such as AIDS and drug-resistant tuberculosis, which he fights on behalf of his indigent patients, is hard to match. But what is particularly relevant in appreciating the contribution of this powerful book is that Farmer is a visionary analyst who looks beyond the details of fragmentary explanations to seek an integrated understanding of a complex reality."--Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate, Economics

This book examines Irish Poor Law reform during the years of the Irish revolution and Irish Free State. This work is a significant addition to the growing historiography of the twentieth century which moves beyond political history, and demonstrates that concepts of respectability, social class and gender are central dynamics in Irish society. This book provides the first major study of local welfare practices and exploration of policies, attitudes and the poor. This monograph examines local public assistance regimes, institutional and child welfare, and hospital care. It charts the transformation of workhouses into a network of local authority welfare and healthcare institutions including county homes, county hospitals, and mother and baby homes. The book's exploration of welfare and healthcare during revolutionary and independent Ireland provides fresh and original insights into this critical juncture in Irish history. The book will appeal to Irish historians and those with interests in welfare, the Poor Law and the social history of medicine and institutions. -- .

At the beginning of the homelessness epidemic in the 1980s, Josephine Ensign was a young, white, Southern, Christian wife, mother, and nurse running a new medical clinic for the homeless in the heart of the South. Through her work and intense relationships with patients and co-workers, her worldview was shattered, and after losing her job, family, and house, she became homeless herself. She reconstructed her life with altered views on homelessness-and on the health care system. In Catching Homelessness, Ensign reflects on how this work has changed her and how her work has changed through the experience of being homeless-providing a piercing look at the homelessness industry, nursing, and our country's health care safety net.

The aim of this book is to provide the reader with the broad spectrum of poverty and social policy issues in Central and Eastern Europe, and address the most urgent topics of welfare state research, namely poverty, children and social policy; gender, social policy and poverty; urban policy, renewal and poverty, and overall challenges to social policy reform. The book demonstrates that despite an increase in poverty and inequalities in many Central and Eastern European countries during the last 18 years, the social policy systems have not experienced a radical dismantlement throughout the entire region. The post-Communist welfare state still shows more comprehensive solutions to social problems than residual ones. Nevertheless, the deteriorated fiscal capacities of the state in some cases hinder the successful poverty solutions as well as the expansion of the welfare programmes. Yet, the Central and Eastern European region is very diverse regarding the scope and depth of social problems encountered and some countries have implemented more successful policy solutions than other ones. Furthermore, the findings of this volume demonstrate that Central and Eastern European countries are not so dramatically distinct from Western Europe, neither in their social problems encountered, nor in their solutions. Nevertheless, the experience of the socialist regime, the relatively lower wages and lower social benefits as well as the higher share of GDP produced in a shadow economy allow the CEE countries to group into the distinct post-Communist regime.