In the last two decades, across a range of countries high growth rates have reduced poverty but have been accompanied by rising inequality. This paper is motivated by this stylized fact, and by the strong distributional concerns that persist among populations and policy makers alike, despite the poverty reduction observed in official statistics where growth has been sufficiently high. This seem...

The right to health as a fundamental human right is enshrined in the World Health Organization's charter and has been reaffirmed in international agreements spanning decades. This new journal reminds us of the essential characteristic of poverty as a violent abuse of human rights. The context of poverty - its social, political and economic dimensions - remain in the reader's mind as evidence is...

BACKGROUND Social inequality as a social and economic phenomenon has become an issue of common interest in Europe and other societies worldwide, mainly after the recent global financial and economic crisis that occurred in 2008. The increasing gap observed between socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged people has caused intensive debates in politics, social sciences and in the field of ...

While economic growth generally reduces income poverty, there are pronounced differences in the strength of this relationship across countries. Typical explanations for this variation include measurement errors in growth-poverty accounting and countries’ different compositions of economic growth. We explore the additional influence of economic structure in determining a country’s growth-poverty...

background: poverty is a multidimensional phenomenon that can be defined in both economic and social terms. the paper attempts to review existing evidence to understand the relation between poverty and ill health in the context of the limited conceptual and operational definitions of these terms. the paper uses two of hills criteria- reversibility and dose response relationship to understand th...

We examine the effect of macroeconomic performance on poverty in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. Our study advances research on this issue in a variety of ways: we utilize variation across the states rather than relying on over-time trends for the country as a whole; we analyze cross-state variation in both levels and change over time; we disentangle the impact of three different ...

The poverty rate among children is higher today than it was in the late 1960s, a few years after the War on Poverty was launched. In 1969, 13.8 percent of all children lived in families with incomes below the poverty line; in 1988, 19.7 percent did. Whereas most studies of child poverty focus on the negative effects of deteriorating economic circumstances and the increasing percentage of childr...

This paper asks how much we should care about changes in Lorenz curves and standard inequality measures when economic growth takes place. I conclude that these changes are of some importance but that other aspects of inequality and poverty are more important. Introduction In December, 2006, the new President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, convened a workshop on economic inequality. Chile has achi...