Global economic recovery in the aftermath of the Great Recession has not been experienced equally: while the share of wealth owned by the richest 3% has grown, the share owned by the poorest 90% continues to decline, as reported by Oxfam in 2016. This wealth divide disproportionately affects racial and ethnic minority communities. This book underscores the importance of financial capability and asset building (FCAB) practice, policy and research during a period when vulnerable populations face increasingly difficult economic and financial realities. At the same time, retrenchment and privatization of government-sponsored social services have eroded the safety net available for families experiencing poverty or near-poverty conditions. The proliferation of products and services available from both formal and informal financial institutions highlights the need to promote FCAB to avoid and/or recover from financial difficulties, crises and poverty. The contributors to this volume disseminate findings from interventions designed to increase financial knowledge, financial management and financial access across several vulnerable populations, including immigrant communities. Further, they demonstrate the need for culturally sensitive FCAB service delivery, considering opportunities and barriers posed by past and current life situations, experiences and environments experienced by different populations. The book is aimed at policymakers, researchers and practitioners who assist financially vulnerable people. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Community Practice.

Originally published in 1987 Pressure for the Poor looks at the debate surrounding the role of pressure groups in policy making. It closely relates theories of pressure group behaviour with the findings of research into the poverty lobby in the UK. The analysis is based on interviews with leading activists in more than forty interest groups, which are all concerned with trying to influence social security policies of government in the field of income maintenance. The book examines the origins and maintenance of such a wide range of interest groups in in this field, the strategies they pursue, and their impact on policy outcomes.

Since the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971, political philosophers in the English-speaking world have shared a broad consensus that social justice should be understood as a matter of fair distribution of social resources. Many contemporary political philosophers disagree sharply about what would count as a fair distribution of social resources, yet agree that if social resources were to be distributed fairly, then social justice would exist. In Beyond Redistribution, Kevin M. Graham argues that political theories operating on a distributive understanding of social justice fail to address adequately certain forms of social injustice related to race. Graham argues that political philosophy could understand race-related injustice more fully by shifting its focus away from distributive inequities between whites and nonwhites and toward white supremacy, the unfair power relationships that allow whites to dominate and oppress nonwhites. Beyond Redistribution offers a careful, detailed critique of the positions of leading contemporary liberal political philosophers on race-related issues of social justice. Graham's analysis of the racial politics of police violence and public education in Omaha, Nebraska, vividly illustrates why the search for racial justice in the United States must move beyond redistribution.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Climate change is the main challenge facing developed countries in the 21st century. To what extent does this agenda converge with issues of poverty and social exclusion? Climate change and poverty offers a timely new perspective on the 'ecosocial' understanding of the causes and symptoms of, and solutions to, poverty and applies this to recent developments across a number of areas, including fuel poverty, food poverty, housing, transport and air pollution. Unlike any other publication, the book therefore establishes a new agenda for both environmental and social policies which has cross-national relevance. It will appeal to students in social policy, public policy, applied social studies and politics and will also be of interest to those studying international development, economics and geography

From politics, economics, and society to health and environment, this volume presents 31 diverse angles on the inequality and poverty in contemporary South Africa and places them in a global context. Designed and written as a reflection of critical issues, this study provides an emerging picture that shows the need to accelerate the pace of poverty eradication and to change the developmental trajectory of South Africa. The in-depth analyses deal with topics that include ideology and modern and traditional leadership; the role of national, provincial, and local government in poverty alleviation; development, economic growth, employment creation, and housing; the media; social cohesion; HIV and AIDS; climate change; regionalism and continental power relations; and the impact of global economics on South Africa. This accessible and fascinating research is aimed at the general interest reader as well as the specialist and is destined to become the research reference for the next decade.

When and why do the urban poor vote for opposition parties in Africa's electoral democracies? The strategies used by political parties to incorporate the urban poor into the political arena provide a key answer to this question. This book explores and defines the role of populism in Africa's urban centers and its political outcomes. In particular, it examines how a populist strategy offers greater differentiation from the multitude of African parties that are defined solely by their leader's personality, and greater policy congruence with those issues most relevant to the lives of the urban poor. These arguments are elaborated through a comparative analysis of Senegal and Zambia based on surveys with informal sector workers and interviews with slum dwellers and politicians. The book contributes significantly to scholarship on opposition parties and elections in Africa, party linkages, populism, and democratic consolidation.

Winner of the 2011 Paul Davidoff award

This is a book about poverty but it does not study the poor and the powerless; instead it studies those who manage poverty. It sheds light on how powerful institutions control "capital," or circuits of profit and investment, as well as "truth," or authoritative knowledge about poverty. Such dominant practices are challenged by alternative paradigms of development, and the book details these as well. Using the case of microfinance, the book participates in a set of fierce debates about development - from the role of markets to the secrets of successful pro-poor institutions. Based on many years of research in Washington D.C., Bangladesh, and the Middle East, Poverty Capital also grows out of the author's undergraduate teaching to thousands of students on the subject of global poverty and inequality.

Based on ethnographic research in Contra Costa County, California (CCC), Pimping the Welfare System highlights a welfare program implemented after welfare reform that differed in significant ways from the predominant work first approach implemented by most welfare programs. The book argues that by imparting dominant economic, social, and cultural capital, CCC's welfare program empowered participants and improved their quality of life and life chances. Successfully transmitting these types of capital, however, was dependent upon the discourses, practices, and pedagogy deployed by welfare workers-as well as the policies, practices, and resources of the welfare program. In particular, CCC's welfare workers encouraged the acquisition and use of dominant capital (that which is desired by the labor market) by acknowledging and respecting the various types of capital welfare participants already had, and by encouraging participants to make strategic choices about deploying different types of capital. This book calls into question monolithic understandings of economic, social, and cultural capital and encourages a new conceptualization of capital that resists framing poor women as fundamentally "lacking." In addition, it points to ways welfare administrators and welfare workers can develop more empowering programs even within the confines of federal, state, and local regulations.

Climate change is the main challenge facing developed countries in the 21st century. To what extent does this agenda converge with issues of poverty and social exclusion? Climate change and poverty offers a timely new perspective on the 'ecosocial' understanding of the causes and symptoms of, and solutions to, poverty and applies this to recent developments across a number of areas, including fuel poverty, food poverty, housing, transport and air pollution. Unlike any other publication, the book therefore establishes a new agenda for both environmental and social policies which has cross-national relevance. It will appeal to students in social policy, public policy, applied social studies and politics and will also be of interest to those studying international development, economics and geography

In comparison to other social groups, India's rural poor - and particularly Adivasis and Dalits - have seen little benefit from the country's economic growth over the last three decades. Though economists and statisticians are able to model the form and extent of this inequality, their work is rarely concerned with identifying possible causes. Employment, Poverty and Rights in India analyses unemployment in India and explains why the issues of employment and unemployment should be the appropriate prism to understand the status of wellbeing in India. The author provides a historical analysis of policy interventions on behalf of the colonial and postcolonial state with regard to the alleviation of unemployment and poverty in India and in West Bengal in particular. Arguing that, as long as poverty - either as a concept or as an empirical condition - remains as a technical issue to be managed by governmental technologies, the 'poor' will be held responsible for their own fate and the extent of poverty will continue to increase. The book contends that rural unemployment in India is not just an economic issue but a political process that has consistently been shaped by various socio-economic, political and cultural factors since the colonial period. The analysis which depends mainly on ethnography extends to the implementation of the 'New Rights Agenda', such as the MGNREGA, at the rural margin. Challenging the dominant approach to poverty, this book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of South Asian studies, Indian Political Economy, contemporary political theories, poverty studies, neo-liberalism, sociology and social anthropology as well as development studies.

Poverty is not a neutral phenomenon, nor are social inclusion programmes neutrally conceived, designed and implemented.Their ultimate nature is built upon ideas, values, actors, politics and economic constraints.This topical book is one of the first to examine the social and political construction of anti-poverty programmes in Central Eastern Europe and their transformation from communist rule to the current economic crisis. It covers the approach towards the 'parasite' poor through to Guaranteed Minimum Income Schemes and illustrates how the distinction between different categories of 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor has evolved over the years as the result of changing paradigms, combined with the pressure exerted by domestic and international actors, the European Union and the World Bank among others. This text breaks new ground for social policy students and scholars interested in understanding how differently post-communist welfare states have represented, legitimised and dealt with poverty, need and social justice in accordance with divergent normative frameworks constructed at national level.

This study, first published in 1993, analyses the relationship among poverty, food insecurity and commercialization in rural China by employing agricultural household models. Data are derived from a 10,000 household subsample of the annual rural household consumption and expenditure survey.

This book is open access under a CCBY license. This book investigates child poverty from a philosophical perspective. It identifies the injustices of child poverty, relates them to the well-being of children, and discusses who has a moral responsibility to secure social justice for children.

Throughout their lifetime, men and women are subject to a wide variety of risks, such as illness, accident, death, or less directly, unemployment, crop failure, loss of property, disability, business failure, and skill obsolescence.This book investigates the relationships between rural poverty, risk, and development. Building upon the author's work in the area, it summarises the contributions of recent theoretical and empirical work to our understanding of how risk affects rural poverty levels in developing countries. In particular the book examines what we do and do not know about risk coping strategies among today's poor rural societies. Ways in which these strategies may be re-examined and improved by governments and international organisations are proposed. Rural Poverty, Risk and Development is an important contribution to the development literature and should be read by anyone interested in exploring the causes of and solutions to poverty in rural areas.

Early education and care has become a central policy area in many countries. As services expand rapidly, it is crucial to examine whether children from disadvantaged backgrounds receive provision of the highest possible quality. In this original, topical book, leading experts from eight countries examine how early education and care is organised, funded and regulated in their countries. Bringing together recent statistical evidence, the book gives an up-to-date picture of access to services by different groups, providing rich insights on how policies play out in practice, and the extent to which they help or hinder disadvantaged children to receive high quality provision. An equal start? reveals the common tensions and complexities countries face in ensuring that early education and care is affordable, accessible and of high quality. Its critical examination of the potential for better policies ensures that An equal start? will be of interest to academic readers as well as policy makers and practitioners.

This book analyses government relationships with international financial institutions by evaluating the role of citizen participation when national poverty reduction policies are formulated in low-income countries. Based on in-depth research from Bangladesh, the concept of participation is investigated from the contrasting perspectives of theory and practice. The first part of the book explores the rhetoric of participation in development policies, while the second part presents empirical evidence of participation in the formulation of Bangladesh's Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper where, at local level, development brokers play an important role. It argues that participatory policies are not enough, that an overhaul is needed in the approach to poverty reduction which will require strong political commitment. This topical book will make essential reading for academics, students and researchers in international development studies and poverty-related fields.

50 years ago, World Bank President Robert McNamara promised to end poverty. Alleviation was to rely on economic growth, resulting in higher incomes stimulated by Bank loans processed by deskbound Washington staff, trickling down to the poorest. Instead, child poverty and homelessness are on the increase everywhere. In this book, anthropologist and former World Bank Advisor Glynn Cochrane argues that instead of Washington's "management by seclusion," poverty alleviation requires personal engagement with the poorest by helpers with hands-on local and cultural skills. Here, the author argues, the insights provided by anthropological fieldwork have a crucial role to play.

New York Times bestselling author Paul Tough's Whatever It Takes is "one of the best books ever written about how poverty influences learning, and vice versa" (The Washington Post). What would it take? That was the question that Geoffrey Canada found himself asking. What would it take to change the lives of poor children -- not one by one, through heroic interventions and occasional miracles, but in big numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide? The question led him to create the Harlem Children's Zone, a ninety-seven-block laboratory in central Harlem where he is testing new and sometimes controversial ideas about poverty in America. His conclusion: if you want poor kids to be able to compete with their middle-class peers, you need to change everything in their lives -- their schools, their neighborhoods, even the child-rearing practices of their parents. Whatever It Takes is a tour de force of reporting, an inspired portrait not only of Geoffrey Canada but also of the parents and children in Harlem who are struggling to better their lives, often against great odds. Carefully researched and deeply affecting, this is a dispatch from inside the most daring and potentially transformative social experiment of our time.

Assembled from a series of newspaper articles first published in the newspaper Morning Chronicle throughout the 1840s, this exhaustively researched, richly detailed survey of the teeming street denizens of London is a work both of groundbreaking sociology and salacious voyeurism. In an 1850 review of the survey, just prior to its initial book publication, William Makepeace Thackeray called it "tale of terror and wonder" offering "a picture of human life so wonderful, so awful, so piteous and pathetic, so exciting and terrible, that readers of romances own they never read anything like to it." Delving into the world of the London "street-folk"-the buyers and sellers of goods, performers, artisans, laborers and others-this extraordinary work inspired the socially conscious fiction of Charles Dickens in the 19th century as well as the urban fantasy of Neil Gaiman in the late 20th. Volume II explores the lives of: sellers of secondhand merchandise sellers of live animals sellers of natural curiosities "street-Jews" chimney sweepers and more. English journalist HENRY MAYHEW (1812-1887) was a founder and editor of the satirical magazine Punch.

Former Brookings Senior Fellow Susan E. Rice spearheads an investigation of the connections between poverty and fragile states and the implications for American security. Coedited by Rice and former Brookings colleagues Corinne Graff and Carlos Pascual, "Confronting Poverty" is a timely reminder that alleviating global poverty and shoring up weak states are not only humanitarian and economic imperatives, but key components of a more balanced and sustainable U.S. national security strategy.

Rice elucidates the relationship between poverty, state weakness, and transnational security threats, and Graff and Pascual offer policy recommendations. The book's overarching conclusions highlight the need to invest in poverty alleviation and capacity building in weak states in order to break the vicious cycle of poverty, fragility, and transnational threats.

"Confronting Poverty" grows out of a project on global poverty and U.S. national security that Rice directed at Brookings from 2002 through January 2009, before she became U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations.

President Reagan's Conservative Fiscal Policy explores how the Reagan administration's (1981-1988) fiscal policy changed the national economy and adversely impacted unemployment among African Americans. This work features detailed analysis of Reaganomics, supply-side fiscal policies, and major budget cuts to domestic employment training programs, such as the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) Program, as they relate to African Americans' unemployment levels and President Reagan's style of leadership and conservative ideology. Author Chiazam Ugo Okoye also scrutinizes three specific tax relief acts: The Economic Recovery and Tax Act, 1981 (ERTA); The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, 1982 (TEFRA); and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA).

First published in 1979, Urban Poverty in Britain 1830-1914 examines the plight of the poor in towns as a direct result of industrialization. This valuable study examines the major causes of poverty - low pay, casual labour, unemployment, sickness, widowhood, large families, old age, drink and personal failings - and society's response to the problem. It also pays attention to the changes in food consumption brought about by migration to the urban areas. Detailed accounts of specific problems and specific situations are combined with a look at the broader questions, and subsequently provides a thorough account of urban poverty in this period.

This authoritative collection, which includes a new introduction surveying the fields, contains key contributions from the comparative literature on the politics of income maintenance policy.In recent years theoretical work has been dominated by Gosta Esping-Andersen's regime theory. This volume demonstrates how that theory, together with arguments on convergence and path-dependency, has been applied to the comparative study of income maintenance policy. It highlights issues about the difference between social insurance and social assistance and about the important differences in the way women and families are treated. The collection looks at the literature that seeks to explain cutbacks, or their absence, highlighting issues about pensions policy. Income Maintenance Policy will be an invaluable source of literature for researchers, students and policymakers alike.

This thought-provoking book provides an in-depth analysis of the working poor phenomenon and its causes across welfare regimes, and identifies the most efficient policy mixes and best practices that could be utilized to resolve this problem. Eric Crettaz argues that 'the working poor' is too broad a category to be used for meaningful academic or policy discussion, and that a distinction must be made between different categories of poor workers. He illustrates how different welfare regimes generate different forms of working poverty via in-depth case studies of various OECD countries over the past decade, underpinned by a theoretical and conceptual framework. Using meta-analyses of evaluations of social policy tools, the author addresses the key question of what constitutes the most efficient policies to deal with the problem of working poverty. Fighting Working Poverty in Post-industrial Economies will prove an enlightening and stimulating read for academics, researchers and students across various disciplines including sociology, economics and political science. In addition, policy makers and other stakeholders seeking innovative solutions to the potentially growing problem of working poverty will find this book to be an invaluable point of reference. Contents: 1. The Dilemmas and Puzzles of the Fight Against Working Poverty 2. Arbitrary Definitions, Official Definitions and Useful Typologies 3. The Three Mechanisms that Lead to Working Poverty 4. Potential Solutions: Minimum Wages, Social Transfers and Childcare Policy 5. The Real World of Social Policies: The Welfare Regime Approach 6. What Works Where, and for Whom? A Meta-analytical Approach 7. The Weight of Each Working Poverty Mechanism Across Welfare Regimes 8. There is No Such Thing as the Working Poor or a One-Size-Fits-All Solution Appendix: Summary Tables and Datasets Used for the Meta-analyses References