Poverty Reference library
An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age
... The history of poverty cannot be written simply by establishing a measure or threshold of deprivation and looking for all who fell beneath it, since it is also a history of shifting definitions and perspective. The terms ‘poverty’ and ‘poor’ were particularly dense and highly contested concepts in this period. They described a social and economic situation which sometimes required charity or statutory relief, but they were also terms of political analysis which conveyed specific values, attitudes, and explanations of how society in general was composed...
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A Dictionary of Economics (5 ed.)
...lift everybody above the poverty line. If poverty is relative, then poverty will be very difficult to eliminate. See also poverty line ; poverty trap...
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William Brown
A Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations (4 ed.)
... Poverty is the state of being poor; that is, lacking the basic needs of life such as food, health, education, and shelter. Most frequently, poverty is discussed in relation to household income, though this is contested. In fact, a number of different approaches to defining and measuring poverty can be identified. One distinction is between ‘absolute poverty’ and ‘relative poverty’. Absolute poverty is defined in terms of material deprivation defined in terms of income or other basic needs of life. Absolute poverty is usually measured using a ‘poverty...
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A Dictionary of Public Health (2 ed.)
...poverty The condition of having insufficient resources to obtain or provide the necessities of life. People afflicted with poverty are especially vulnerable to adverse events they cannot control and often lack political influence and access to needed health and social services. The World Bank defines poverty in low-income nations as an income of US$1 per day or less. In the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ( OECD ) nations, poverty is arbitrarily defined as financial income below a specific level, which varies from one nation to...
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A Dictionary of Sociology (4 ed.)
...Since relative poverty is a matter of differences in levels of material resources—that is, of inequalities in their distribution across a society—measures of relative poverty are potentially no less objective than those of absolute poverty. They are not simply a matter of subjective feelings of poverty, though such feelings may be of importance when analysing the consequences of poverty. Subsistence definitions of poverty are of considerable value in examining Third World poverty, and international studies show that the overall level of poverty measured in...
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A Dictionary of Human Geography
...as a percentage of the poverty line. It shows the depth of poverty. The poverty severity index further quantifies the level of inequality among those below the poverty line. Welfare definitions of poverty are generally realized by more broad-based indices ( see Human Development Index ). The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) calculates a Multidimensional Poverty Index based on ten indicators including whether a household has electricity, a dirt floor, clean water within 30 minutes by foot, children at school, and so forth. A household...
poverty Reference library
Dictionary of the Social Sciences
... A condition of absolute or relative deprivation of material and cultural resources. The term absolute poverty refers to the condition in which the basic resources necessary to sustain life are lacking; relative poverty is the lack of resources in comparison with other members of a given society. Poverty is conventionally measured by income, although a number of studies have called attention to the distinct importance of wealth—or its absence. The concept of the poverty line , first introduced by Charles Booth ( The Life and Labour of the People in...
Poverty (The Business of Sustainability) Reference library
Mark B. MILSTEIN, Erik SIMANIS, Duncan DUKE, and Stuart HART
Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability
...poverty manifests itself in localized ways, relying heavily on a subset of tangible or intangible indicators tends to render generalizations about poverty inaccurate. Urban poverty differs significantly from rural poverty. Poverty in highly industrialized nations differs significantly from poverty in agrarian societies. Tangible metrics feel precise, but they mask the fine-grained nature of poverty’s causes, effects, and resolutions. Poverty lines set by specific income levels (e.g., $1, $2, or $3 per day) suggest definitive measures at which poverty does...
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A Concise Companion to the Jewish Religion
... Jewish attitudes to poverty vary. Throughout Jewish history the poor are treated with respect, and alleviation of their sufferings is strongly advocated ( see CHARITY ). But this does not necessarily mean that poverty is seen as something of value. There is nothing in Judaism to correspond to the Christian monastic ideal of taking poverty vows. In the Bible possessions are usually seen as a blessing. Generally speaking, much depended on the economic conditions in which Jews found themselves. In Eastern Europe, for example, where the economic conditions...
Poverty Reference library
Encyclopedia of Social Work (20 ed.)
...determinants in order to better understand the existence of poverty. Third, strategies and solutions to poverty are briefly reviewed. causes of poverty; human capital; labor market; life course; poverty dynamics; poverty measures; poverty rates; residential segregation; social welfare state; solutions to poverty; structural vulnerability Context The subject of poverty has been of central importance to the profession of social work. In fact it could be argued that addressing poverty lies at the heart of what the profession stands for. As Simon notes, the original...
Poverty Reference library
Jesudas M. Athyal
The Oxford Encyclopaedia of South Asian Christianity
... South Asia is a region of paradoxes. Traditionally a poverty-stricken area, the region has undergone tremendous economic growth during the past few decades. In India alone, food production has trebled since 1950 . Industrial production went up by 6.9 times between 1951 and 1985 . Economic growth has, in fact, kept ahead of population growth. Such figures, however, tend to blur the reality of stark poverty still widely prevalent in the region, especially in several parts of India * and Bangladesh * . The paradox of affluence and poverty existing...
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The Oxford Companion to United States History
...lift them out of poverty, chronic joblessness defined a large, new component of urban poverty. Throughout American history, poverty has displayed a rural as well as an urban face. In rural areas, low wages, soil exhaustion, the exploitation of sharecroppers and miners, declining prices of farm commodities, and natural disasters all promoted poverty. Rural poverty in southern Appalachia initially inspired the War on Poverty in the early 1960s and the redesign and vast expansion of the food-stamp program a few years later. Although rural poverty persisted, by...
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Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World
... [ This entry includes three subentries, an overview and a discussion of poverty in Africa and in Latin America .] Overview The definition of poverty has changed over time and across cultures. In parts of Africa, for example, to be poor once meant to be alone and without kin. Poverty thus concerned human relationships, not economic resources. Today, however, poverty invariably refers to economics, though even here scholars differ as to what exactly constitutes poverty. Generally poverty refers to deficits in the material standards of living, such as food,...
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A Dictionary of Geography (5 ed.)
...the majority of them girls, do not attend school.’ Poverty is not restricted to the developing world: in inner London in 2006 , 51% of children were living in poverty and US Census Bureau records show that the proportion of Americans living in poverty rose between 1974 and 2004 , from 11.2% to 12.7%. For the period 2000–2005 the Cuban infant mortality rate was 8/000; the same as for the USA ( World Mortality Report , 2005 ). ‘The only positive interpretation that can be given to this picture of poverty and inequality in the developed world is that many...
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The Oxford Companion to Canadian History
... . The experience of poverty in Canada is defined by three historical periods: the years before the welfare state (until the 1940s), the years marked by the flowering of the welfare state (1940s–1970s), and those since the welfare state began to crumble (1980s–present). Whereas unimaginable privation was a fact of life for the lower classes in the first period, the social legislation of the second took the edge off the worst features of poverty. The third period has been characterized by the plight of such socially marginalized groups as Native people...
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The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States
...poverty in the United States in the year 2000 . There are substantial differences in poverty rates within the Latina and Latino population. Table 2 decomposes poverty rates in the year 2000 by specific Latina and Latino group. Dominicans had the highest poverty rates, with 27.4 percent of that population being poor in 2000 . At the other extreme, the Cuban population had the lowest poverty rates among Latinas and Latinos, with 14.3 percent of Cubans in the United States living in poor families in the year 2000 . What explains the sharply higher poverty...
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The Oxford Companion to Chaucer
...The extreme poverty of the virtuous Griselda and her family and village, which is heavily stressed (NB the repetition of ‘povre’ IV.200, 204, 205, 213, 222, 232), while perhaps infused by the Christian ideals of apostolic poverty, again forms the background to an exemplum of ‘gentilesse’. The ‘narwe cotage’ of the poor and very temperate widow at the beginning of The Nun's Priest's Tale might suggest the setting for a similar exemplum, but the tale takes off in a rather different direction. Many other allusions to or mentions of poverty suggest that it...
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Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope
...health were the chief causes of poverty, though alcohol and improvidence were important contributors. At any time an unfavourable turn of circumstance could knock the unskilled workers off a precarious existence and into destitution. Most of them would know desperate poverty at one or more times in their lives, and particularly in old age, if they made it that far. The task of devising strategies for survival fell heaviest on women as household managers. Trollope did not dwell much on the working poor, though rustic poverty is depicted in the Brattle family...
Poverty Reference library
The New Oxford Companion to Economics in India (3 ed.)
...be privileged as the only one with normative significance and (ii) that inter-temporal poverty comparisons are meaningful only if the poverty line consumption bundle is unvarying over time. In sum, it is—or should be—very hard to accept poverty trends deduced from the official approach to the identification problem. Even so, and taking these sorts of estimates at face value, one finds that more than a quarter of the country’s population was in consumption expenditure poverty in 1999–2000 ( Planning Commission 2002 ). Additionally, one imagines the aggregate...
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The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History
...The subject itself is vast, as the global feminization of poverty may have many causes or correlates, including wars and civil conflicts. For some observers (such as the authors of the Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme), poverty is understood not only in terms of existence below an established minimum income level (income poverty) but also in terms of entitlements, capabilities, or choices (human poverty). Gender Inequality. Feminist approaches to women's poverty—found in the women‐in‐development or gender‐and‐development...
