We use several family-based indicators of household poverty as well as child-reported economic resources and problems to unravel child poverty trends in Sweden. Our results show that absolute (bread-line) household income poverty, as well as economic deprivation, increased with the recession 1991-96, then reduced and has remained largely unchanged since 2006. Relative income poverty has however...

I his 2004 address to the World Conference on the Promotion of Mental Health and Prevention of Mental and Behavioral Disorders, in Auckland, American psychologist George Albee opened with ‘I wrote my first paper emphasizing the necessity of prevention of mental disorders nearly 50 years ago’. After demonstrating in some detail the numerical and economic impossibility of trying to provide mental...

This paper estimates trends in absolute poverty in urban China from 1988 to 2002 using the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) surveys. Poverty incidence curves are plotted, showing that poverty has fallen markedly during the period regardless of the exact location of the poverty line. Income inequality rose from 1988 to 1995 but has been fairly constant thereafter. Models of the determinat...

BACKGROUND Poverty is multi dimensional. Beyond the quantitative and tangible issues related to inadequate income it also has equally important social, more intangible and difficult if not impossible to quantify dimensions. In 2009, we explored these social and relativist dimension of poverty in five communities in the South of Ghana with differing socio economic characteristics to inform the d...

In the midst of political stability and strong economic growth, post-apartheid South Africa is faced with the stubborn reality of widespread poverty and growing inequality. As economic empowerment benefits an expanding, mainly urban black middle class, the majority of people continue to live in poverty and mass unemployment. As the country's remarkable and peaceful transition to democracy unfol...

Chile is maturing politically and becoming a more modern and globalized society. The country’s current priority is to ensure more equitable distribution of economic growth and overall opportunities, which depends on the government’s ability to improve public policy and expand its reach. By international standards, Chile has a high level of income inequality (being among the 50 percent of Latin ...

Despite its centrality to contemporary inequality, working poverty is often popularly discussed but rarely studied by sociologists. Using the Luxembourg Income Study (2009), we analyze whether an individual is working poor across 18 affluent democracies circa 2000. We demonstrate that working poverty does not simply mirror overall poverty and that there is greater cross-national variation in wo...

F ew economic indicators are more closely watched or more important for policy than the official poverty rate. It is used to gauge the extent of deprivation in the United States and to determine how economic well-being has changed over time. The poverty rate is often cited by policymakers, researchers, and advocates who are evaluating social programs that account for more than half a trillion d...

How can indices of multidimensional poverty be adapted to produce measures that quantify both the joint incidence of multiple deprivations and their chronicity? This paper adopts a new approach to the measurement of chronic multidimensional poverty. It relies on the counting approach of Alkire and Foster (2011) for the measurement of multidimensional poverty in each time period and then on the ...