Publications

The paper provides an examination of the relevance of ethics to poverty reduction. It argues that linking the shared values that define the social arrangements and institutions, which we refer to as ‘ethical perspectives’, to the emerging welfare institutions addressing poverty in developing countries provides a window into these processes of justification at a more fundamental level. By ethics of poverty the authors refer to the most basic arguments and processes used to justify how and why we assist people living in poverty. Given the extent to which poverty reflects injustice, they argue it is appropriate to consider poverty in the context of ethics. Drawing on the recent expansion of social assistance in Brazil, South Africa and Ghana, the paper shows that ethical perspectives are relevant to our understanding of the evolution of anti-poverty policy.

This study investigates whether cash transfers enable households facing weather and other negative income shocks to avoid adverse coping strategies that can lead to poverty traps. While cash transfers are not routinely considered in the policy discourse concerning climate adaptation programming, because ex-ante transfers enable households to avoid negative coping strategies and even increase food consumption in the face of covariate weather shocks, cash transfers offer a sound approach for building climate-resilience amongst the world’s most vulnerable and facilitating their “autonomous adaptation” to a changing environment. Cash also enables households to productively cope with the many other idiosyncratic shocks the rural poor routinely face.

Identifying, locating and profiling the poor and deprived individuals in a society are the most basic imperatives for good social policy design. Understanding why people are, and remain, poor is the next analytical step. Multidimensional poverty and deprivation estimates are important new tools in this undertaking. This paper reviews the insights of various contributions from research into multidimensional poverty and deprivation and combines them into an internally consistent framework. The framework adds an important element by emphasising that people may experience various types and forms of poverty and deprivation simultaneously. The experience of poverty is often multifaceted and deprivations are interrelated in many cases. This highlights the necessity to clearly separate the different concepts of poverty and to study their overlap.

Los informes anteriores de esta serie han demostrado que no proteger a los niños de la pobreza es uno de los errores más costosos que puede cometer una sociedad. Son los propios niños quienes asumen el mayor de todos los costos, pero también sus países deben pagar un muy alto precio por su error: menor nivel de competencias y productividad, menor nivel de logros en materia de salud y educación, mayor probabilidad de desempleo y dependencia de la seguridad social, mayor costo de los sistemas de protección judicial y social, y pérdida de cohesión social. En el presente informe se incluyen los datos más recientes comparables a nivel internacional sobre privación infantil y pobreza infantil relativa. Tomadas en su conjunto, estas dos medidas diferentes ofrecen el mejor panorama disponible actualmente sobre la pobreza infantil en las naciones más ricas del mundo.

Report Card 10 considers two views of child poverty in the world’s advanced economies: a measure of absolute deprivation, and a measure of relative poverty. The first measure is a 14-item Child Deprivation Index that represents a significant new development in international monitoring, drawing on data from the European Union’s Statistics on Incomes and Living Conditions survey of 125,000 households in 31 European countries, which has included a section on children for the first time. Children were considered 'deprived' if they lacked two or more of the items, which ranged from three meals a day, to an Internet connection. The second measure covers the EU and an additional six OECD countries (Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United States) and examines the percentage of children living below their national 'poverty line' - defined as 50 per cent of median disposable household income.

С конца 2007 года страны Центральной Азии перенесли два мощных потрясения, следовавших одно за другим: рост цен на продукты питания и топливо в 2007–2008 годах и мировой экономический и финансовый кризис, начавшийся в конце 2008 года. Кризис оказал непосредственное неблагоприятное воздействие на домохозяйства – как бедные, так и состоятельные. Многоаспектность кризиса и постоянно меняющаяся экономическая ситуация ставят под угрозу способность уязвимых домохозяйств справляться с ситуацией и поддерживать свой уровень жизни. Важную роль в реагировании на кризис играют программы социальной защиты.

This paper provides an overview of the social and economic vulnerabilities of households with children in the five Central Asian countries, and assesses the ability of national social protection systems to address these, with the main focus on the role of non-contributory cash transfers financed from general government revenues. The paper concludes that the existing social cash transfer systems are not effective in addressing the needs of poor and vulnerable children and families in Central Asia. Limited coverage together with limited funding reduces the potential poverty reduction impact of the programmes.

This paper describes and empirically tests a number of candidate measures of cumulative deprivation to monitor child well-being in the EU.The authors posit that the ideal measure should be sensitive to changes in the depth of cumulative deprivation and, given its broad use in the policy community, has an intuitive interpretation. Using the 2007 wave of the EU-SILC data, the authors constructed several measures of cumulative deprivation from a set of 13 deprivation indicators for Germany, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

This is an overview to the Innnocenti Social Monitor 2006 which studies child poverty in a fast-changing region. Since 1998 almost all countries of the South-Eastern Europe and Commonwealth of Independent States region have shown signs of economic recovery. The numbers of people living in income poverty has fallen, living standards have generally improved and opportunities for many children in the region have expanded. This signals a turning point in the dramatic decline in social and economic conditions experienced by most children in the region in the early 1990s. Yet there is a serious risk that a part of the new generations of children born since the start of the transition is being left behind. The study shows that not all children are benefiting from the economic growth and that Governments in the region need to give higher policy priority to tackling disadvantage and deprivation endured by children. Pursuing a child rights perspective, the study set outs to measure and understand better the nature and scale of child poverty, as distinct from adult poverty; it highlights the large disparities in child well-being which have emerged in this period of economic expansion, between countries, between regions within countries, and between families; it points to ways in which governments in the region could more effectively address marginalisation and disparities among children. The Innocenti Social Monitor 2006 provides practical examples of ways in which children can be given distinct attention and visibility in the analysis of poverty and in policy priorities, while also stressing that data collection has to be improved and made more accessible in order to allow the impact of policies on children to be effectively assessed and addressed.

This is a study of child poverty in a fast-changing region. Since 1998 almost all countries of the South-Eastern Europe and Commonwealth of Independent States region have shown signs of economic recovery. The numbers of people living in income poverty has fallen, living standards have generally improved and opportunities for many children in the region have expanded. This signals a turning point in the dramatic decline in social and economic conditions experienced by most children in the region in the early 1990s. Yet there is a serious risk that a part of the new generations of children born since the start of the transition is being left behind. The study shows that not all children are benefiting from the economic growth and that Governments in the region need to give higher policy priority to tackling disadvantage and deprivation endured by children. Pursuing a child rights perspective, the study set outs to measure and understand better the nature and scale of child poverty, as distinct from adult poverty; it highlights the large disparities in child well-being which have emerged in this period of economic expansion, between countries, between regions within countries, and between families; it points to ways in which governments in the region could more effectively address marginalisation and disparities among children. The Innocenti Social Monitor 2006 provides practical examples of ways in which children can be given distinct attention and visibility in the analysis of poverty and in policy priorities, while also stressing that data collection has to be improved and made more accessible in order to allow the impact of policies on children to be effectively assessed and addressed.

This is an overview to the Innnocenti Social Monitor 2006 which studies child poverty in a fast-changing region. Since 1998 almost all countries of the South-Eastern Europe and Commonwealth of Independent States region have shown signs of economic recovery. The numbers of people living in income poverty has fallen, living standards have generally improved and opportunities for many children in the region have expanded. This signals a turning point in the dramatic decline in social and economic conditions experienced by most children in the region in the early 1990s. Yet there is a serious risk that a part of the new generations of children born since the start of the transition is being left behind. The study shows that not all children are benefiting from the economic growth and that Governments in the region need to give higher policy priority to tackling disadvantage and deprivation endured by children. Pursuing a child rights perspective, the study set outs to measure and understand better the nature and scale of child poverty, as distinct from adult poverty; it highlights the large disparities in child well-being which have emerged in this period of economic expansion, between countries, between regions within countries, and between families; it points to ways in which governments in the region could more effectively address marginalisation and disparities among children. The Innocenti Social Monitor 2006 provides practical examples of ways in which children can be given distinct attention and visibility in the analysis of poverty and in policy priorities, while also stressing that data collection has to be improved and made more accessible in order to allow the impact of policies on children to be effectively assessed and addressed.

In this paper the situation of three EU countries that have recently experienced substantial but very different reforms of their systems to support families with children is analysed and compared: Austria, Spain and the United Kingdom. The structure of these systems is very different: Austria gives emphasis to universal benefits, Spain to tax concessions and the United Kingdom to means-tested benefits.