a case study on poverty

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Robert Sampson, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, is one of the researchers studying the link between poverty and social mobility.

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Unpacking the power of poverty

Peter Reuell

Harvard Staff Writer

Study picks out key indicators like lead exposure, violence, and incarceration that impact children’s later success

Social scientists have long understood that a child’s environment — in particular growing up in poverty — can have long-lasting effects on their success later in life. What’s less well understood is exactly how.

A new Harvard study is beginning to pry open that black box.

Conducted by Robert Sampson, the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, and Robert Manduca, a doctoral student in sociology and social policy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the study points to a handful of key indicators, including exposure to high levels of lead, violence, and incarceration as key predictors of children’s later success. The study is described in an April paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“What this paper is trying to do, in a sense, is move beyond the traditional neighborhood indicators people use, like poverty,” Sampson said. “For decades, people have shown poverty to be important … but it doesn’t necessarily tell us what the mechanisms are, and how growing up in poor neighborhoods affects children’s outcomes.”

To explore potential pathways, Manduca and Sampson turned to the income tax records of parents and approximately 230,000 children who lived in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, compiled by Harvard’s Opportunity Atlas project. They integrated these records with survey data collected by the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, measures of violence and incarceration, census indicators, and blood-lead levels for the city’s neighborhoods in the 1990s.

They found that the greater the extent to which poor black male children were exposed to harsh environments, the higher their chances of being incarcerated in adulthood and the lower their adult incomes, measured in their 30s. A similar income pattern also emerged for whites.

Among both black and white girls, the data showed that increased exposure to harsh environments predicted higher rates of teen pregnancy.

Despite the similarity of results along racial lines, Chicago’s segregation means that far more black children were exposed to harsh environments — in terms of toxicity, violence, and incarceration — harmful to their mental and physical health.

“The least-exposed majority-black neighborhoods still had levels of harshness and toxicity greater than the most-exposed majority-white neighborhoods, which plausibly accounts for a substantial portion of the racial disparities in outcomes,” Manduca said.

“It’s really about trying to understand some of the earlier findings, the lived experience of growing up in a poor and racially segregated environment, and how that gets into the minds and bodies of children.” Robert Sampson

“What this paper shows … is the independent predictive power of harsh environments on top of standard variables,” Sampson said. “It’s really about trying to understand some of the earlier findings, the lived experience of growing up in a poor and racially segregated environment, and how that gets into the minds and bodies of children.”

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The study isn’t solely focused on the mechanisms of how poverty impacts children; it also challenges traditional notions of what remedies might be available.

“This has [various] policy implications,” Sampson said. “Because when you talk about the effects of poverty, that leads to a particular kind of thinking, which has to do with blocked opportunities and the lack of resources in a neighborhood.

“That doesn’t mean resources are unimportant,” he continued, “but what this study suggests is that environmental policy and criminal justice reform can be thought of as social mobility policy. I think that’s provocative, because that’s different than saying it’s just about poverty itself and childhood education and human capital investment, which has traditionally been the conversation.”

The study did suggest that some factors — like community cohesion, social ties, and friendship networks — could act as bulwarks against harsh environments. Many researchers, including Sampson himself, have shown that community cohesion and local organizations can help reduce violence. But Sampson said their ability to do so is limited.

“One of the positive ways to interpret this is that violence is falling in society,” he said. “Research has shown that community organizations are responsible for a good chunk of the drop. But when it comes to what’s affecting the kids themselves, it’s the homicide that happens on the corner, it’s the lead in their environment, it’s the incarceration of their parents that’s having the more proximate, direct influence.”

Going forward, Sampson said he hopes the study will spur similar research in other cities and expand to include other environmental contamination, including so-called brownfield sites.

Ultimately, Sampson said he hopes the study can reveal the myriad ways in which poverty shapes not only the resources that are available for children, but the very world in which they find themselves growing up.

“Poverty is sort of a catchall term,” he said. “The idea here is to peel things back and ask, What does it mean to grow up in a poor white neighborhood? What does it mean to grow up in a poor black neighborhood? What do kids actually experience?

“What it means for a black child on the south side of Chicago is much higher rates of exposure to violence and lead and incarceration, and this has intergenerational consequences,” he continued. “This is particularly important because it provides a way to think about potentially intervening in the intergenerational reproduction of inequality. We don’t typically think about criminal justice reform or environmental policy as social mobility policy. But maybe we should.”

This research was supported with funding from the Project on Race, Class & Cumulative Adversity at Harvard University, the Ford Foundation, and the Hutchins Family Foundation.

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Luisa's story - an 11 year old girl living in poverty

Mozambique case study shows that poverty is about much more than income

Research Fellow, World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), United Nations University

Anthropologist and senior researcher, Chr. Michelsen Institute

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What does it mean to be poor? On the face of it, this may not sound like a very difficult question. In developed countries, almost all official and everyday definitions refer to poverty in income terms. In this sense, low consumption power (income) and poverty are essentially synonymous.

Outside of developed countries, a similar view of poverty frequently gets headlines. In its global comparisons, the World Bank has adopted the (in)famous poverty line of US$1.90 a day . So, people with daily real incomes below this amount form part of the global poor – thankfully, now a diminishing group.

One might dispute exactly how and where such a poverty line should be set. But the idea that being poor means not having an adequate income often seems uncontroversial.

Of course, among academics things are rarely so settled. Between economists, there is disagreement about whether poverty should be measured only in monetary terms. In other areas of social science, there is a tradition of scepticism that suggests standard quantitative definitions of poverty can be misleading .

Representing poverty as a kind of well-defined objective condition, like an infectious disease, focuses attention on the symptoms and immediate consequences of poverty. It risks diverting attention away from the underlying structural causes and diverse experiences of the poor.

Challenging official narratives

In a recent paper we explore contrasting views of well-being in Mozambique. Our interest reflects the country’s controversial track record. From the early 1990s until recently, Mozambique achieved one of the strongest sustained periods of aggregate economic growth of any country. Yet some argue this growth has largely not trickled down, leaving many behind.

Official poverty estimates undertaken by the government are of the classic quantitative or economic kind. Here a set of basic needs is identified and costed. Households consuming goods worth less than the cost of a minimal basket are deemed to be “poor”. Applying this definition, data from national surveys shows consumption poverty has declined over the past two decades at a steady, but not especially rapid, pace.

Today, almost half of all Mozambicans continue to live in absolute poverty. There are also large spatial gaps in well-being. For example, there is much lower poverty in the south of the country, around the capital city, reflecting widening levels of consumption inequality.

To provide perspective on this official narrative, a range of bottom-up studies of poverty , including our own, have been conducted by anthropologists in different parts of the country. These diverge in both form and content from the economic approach.

Indeed, the very starting point of this research has been distinctive. The intention was not to apply a pre-given or conceptually static definition of poverty, from which a count of the poor could proceed. Instead it was to probe local perspectives on well-being, the diverse forms of disadvantage, and the kinds of social relations in which disadvantage arises.

A main finding that emerges from the anthropological work is that we cannot see the poor without seeing the better-off. Local grammars of poverty – namely, the terms used to describe who are better- or worse-off – consistently distinguish between socially marginalised individuals and those with strong local social connections.

Perceptions of deprivation do highlight material deficiencies, such as a lack of food or clothes. But social relationships are vital to cope with vulnerability (shocks) and to facilitate social mobility. Being poor is intimately connected to one’s perceived “position” in a wider society and, through this, one’s scope for upward movement.

Self-reinforcing disadvantage

The anthropological view highlights the complex and often fairly localised ways in which the powerful, sometimes politically-connected, hoard opportunities for development. This reinforces existing divides and limits the social and economic mobility of the most disadvantaged.

For instance, the National District Development Fund in Niassa, Mozambique’s northern province, was seen as a main source of money for investment in (rural) economic activities. Formally, in allocating the funds, priority was to be given to agriculture rather than businesses, women rather than men, and associations rather than individuals.

But we found that the funds had been systematically co-opted by local influentes . These included traditional authorities, male entrepreneurs and the governing party elite through an intricate system of social relations of exclusion and bribes.

Other vignettes from the lives of the poor point to the diverse mechanisms through which disadvantage is reproduced. This is often linked to specific cultural practices that empower certain groups above others. They also point to the self-reinforcing nature of social and economic disadvantage.

For example, we met a single mother who had lost large parts of her harvest to drought two years in a row. She had struggled hard to put all her three children to school, but with no crops to sell and no well-placed family to support her, she could no longer pay the bribes necessary for her children to move up classes. We also encountered instances where people cut themselves off from vital relationships to avoid exposing themselves to the embarrassment of having failed and so as to preserve their dignity.

Making sense of disciplinary divides

How can we make sense of different disciplinary perspectives on poverty? On the one hand, it is tempting to seek some reconciliation. Surely, metrics of social capital or even subjective well-being can be added to existing measures of consumption power to provide a more complete characterisation of the poor? Or perhaps qualitative follow-ups among the consumption poor could be used to add local context?

Certainly, combined qualitative-quantitative approaches to poverty research have become popular and often yield richer insights than any one method on its own. Yet, as we elaborate in our paper, this somewhat misses the point.

There are fundamental philosophical differences between standard quantitative (economic) and qualitative (anthropological) traditions, which do not admit any easy fusion. These include differences in understandings about the form of social reality, what can be known about poverty, and how poverty is produced and reproduced.

For this reason, it is vital to allow separate and diverse perspectives on poverty to flourish. Each methodological approach has distinct strengths, limitations and policy uses.

The economic approach is essential to track economic progress over time on a consistent basis and identify households at greatest risk of consumption poverty (for example, to target social policy). But to uncover – and even resist – the inherently relational and often political ways in which poverty emerges and is reproduced requires a deeper, local, ethnographic touch.

Bringing these different perspectives into a meaningful dialogue with each other remains the next challenge.

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Case Studies Shed Light on Poverty in America

A new report from the Community Affairs offices of the Federal Reserve System and the Brookings Institution examines the issue of concentrated poverty.

The Enduring Challenge of Concentrated Poverty in America: Case Studies from Communities Across the U.S. profiles 16 high-poverty communities, including immigrant gateway, Native American, urban and rural communities.

One of the case studies focuses on Holmes County, Miss., located in the district served by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. With a poverty rate that stood at more than 41 percent in 2000, Holmes County is both geographically and economically isolated. It has lost many jobs during past decades—and continues to do so.

The information collected on all the communities in this report contributes to an understanding of the dynamics of poor people living in poor communities and the policies that will be needed to bring both into the economic mainstream.

The report is available at www.stlouisfed.org/community_development/ .

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Bridges is a regular review of regional community and economic development issues. Views expressed are not necessarily those of the St. Louis Fed or Federal Reserve System.

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Decent Work and Economic Growth pp 1–12 Cite as

Poverty Reduction: Concept, Approaches, and Case Studies

• Yakubu Aliyu Bununu 7  
• Living reference work entry
• First Online: 10 January 2020

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Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals ((ENUNSDG))

Definitions

Poverty is universally measured in monetary expenditure terms, and individuals that are considered poor are those living on less than US$1.25 per day. Poverty is however multifaceted as it includes the multitude of lack and deprivations that poor people are subjected to in their lives on a daily basis. These include but are not limited to disease and poor health conditions, illiteracy and lack of access to education, appalling living conditions, lack of access to economic opportunity and disempowerment, underemployment, vulnerability to violence, and exposure to hazardous environmental conditions (OPHI 2019 ). Thus, poverty reduction can be considered as the improvement of an individual’s or group’s monetary expenditure to an amount above the poverty line while improving access to education, healthcare, information, economic opportunities security of land-tenure, and all the other deprivations associated with it.

Introduction

The eradication of poverty is perhaps the only...

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Yakubu Aliyu Bununu

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Bununu, Y.A. (2020). Poverty Reduction: Concept, Approaches, and Case Studies. In: Leal Filho, W., Azul, A., Brandli, L., Özuyar, P., Wall, T. (eds) Decent Work and Economic Growth. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71058-7_31-1

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Impact case study

Improving the lives of disadvantaged people through better measurement of poverty and inequality.

  [CASE] reviewed 34 studies of whether family incomes affected children’s outcomes throughout the OECD, and found that family income mattered. What is the point of having some of the world’s finest researchers if we do not listen to them? … Money matters, alongside a good education and a healthy life, to outcomes. Alison McGovern MP House of Commons, Welfare Reform and Work Bill debate, 23 February 2016

Research by

Dr Tania Burchardt

Department of social policy.

Professor Sir John Hills

Deceased, december 2020.

Dr Abigail McKnight

Dr Kitty Stewart

Dr Polly Vizard

Research by LSE’s Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion on poverty and inequalities has influenced how critical social problems are measured and understood.  

What was the problem? 

Policymakers, practitioners, and advocates working to alleviate social disadvantages face the challenge of how to measure and analyse poverty and inequalities in a coherent, comprehensive, and systematic way. This is necessary to understand the causes and consequences of poverty and inequality, and to design policy solutions. Measurements of inequality often rely on a single dimension, such as income, which is crucial but by no means the only respect in which inequalities affect people’s lives.   

A particular problem here is identifying and analysing groups that face multiple, overlapping inequalities that compound social disadvantages, which can be missed by conventional measures.   

What did we do? 

Over the past 25 years, research by LSE’s Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion ( CASE ) has made substantial contributions to how poverty and multidimensional inequalities are understood and measured – and consequently tackled. This work has highlighted previously hidden or neglected disparities, and, in so doing, given visibility and voice to marginalised groups. CASE has done this by developing tools for measuring multidimensional inequality, while also demonstrating the central role that poverty plays as a driver of inequality .   

An important strand in this research has its foundations in Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen’s capability approach , combined with international human rights theory. This perspective brings together a focus on what people are able to do in their lives – their capabilities – with the principles of human rights (for example, non-discrimination and being treated with dignity and respect).  

CASE researchers have developed systematic and comprehensive monitoring frameworks for social disadvantage and multidimensional inequality. Research by CASE has highlighted the phenomenon of “data exclusion”, bringing visibility to neglected groups and overlapping disadvantages, and applying a unified approach to issues that have previously had disparate treatment.  

To date, four frameworks have been developed: the Equality Measurement Framework (EMF), Children’s Measurement Framework (CMF), and Human Rights Measurement Framework (HRMF) for the UK; and the Multidimensional Inequality Framework (MIF), developed in conjunction with Oxfam for international use. Each includes up to ten critical dimensions, covering standards of living, health, education, and physical and legal security. The frameworks disaggregate measures by characteristics such as gender, age, ethnicity, and disability status, and also highlight data gaps.  

Some vulnerable children are missing from standard monitoring exercises and are consequently overlooked in policies to address childhood disadvantage. CASE research tackled this “data exclusion” by making innovative use of administrative and matched survey data to generate new estimates, including the number of children living in households where there is domestic violence and/or substance abuse.   

CASE analysis has also highlighted how “money matters” in shaping children’s life chances. A systematic review examining the relationship between poverty and children’s educational, behavioural, and health outcomes identified strong evidence of a causal link between low income and poor outcomes. This supports the retention of low income as a key marker of poverty and disadvantage, which became a major policy issue in 2016.  

Another example of CASE research on particularly at-risk groups is its work on older hospital inpatients . One million older people reported poor or inconsistent standards of support with eating when in hospital in England. CASE found that disabled women in hospital aged 80 and over were more than one-and-a-half times as likely as an average older inpatient to have their need for support with nutrition neglected.  

What happened? 

CASE research has provided frameworks for improved monitoring of social welfare, equality, and social inclusion. These frameworks have been applied in the UK, Ireland, and within the EU. CASE has also worked with national and international NGOs and civil society groups to measure and tackle inequality.   

CASE’s measurement frameworks have been incorporated into governmental and institutional approaches to measuring and reporting on inequalities. In 2015, the UK’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) began using four measurement frameworks for equality and human rights, three of which were CASE’s. When the UK Cabinet Office undertook a Race Disparity Audit in 2017, it consulted with CASE and built on the insights CASE shared to develop their own multidimensional and disaggregated framework. Evidence from this Race Disparity Audit was used across government in work to “explain or change” differences in outcomes for ethnic groups. CASE’s research on children’s multidimensional disadvantage also fed into work on vulnerable children undertaken by the Children’s Commissioner’s Office.  

In 2016, during the course of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill, the government proposed abandoning internationally accepted measures of poverty, which include relative and absolute household income poverty, in favour of a measure that relied on factors such as life chances and household worklessness. Dr Kitty Stewart used a Freedom of Information request to reveal the strength of opposition to this change from the government’s own consultation. She briefed members of Parliament, and organised a letter from 175 academics, published in The Times , making the case for retaining income as a central measurement of poverty . CASE work was cited in debates in both Houses of Parliament. This ultimately contributed to securing an amendment to the Bill committing the government to continuing to publish income-based child poverty measures.  

The work on household income and child poverty has also been used by influential national pressure groups Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) and Shelter to strengthen their legal challenges to the UK government’s revised benefit cap. CASE evidence was extensively cited in this litigation. It has also underpinned CPAG’s other work, including toolkits to help London and Scottish school communities take action on poverty.   

CASE’s work on dignity and nutrition for older patients in hospitals has been influential in developing NHS England’s work in this area, and it was cited in a debate on older people’s human rights in care in the House of Lords . It also featured extensively in national print and broadcast media, including BBC News.   

Internationally, CASE research has shaped approaches to measuring and addressing multidimensional inequality. Oxfam worked with CASE in its development and implementation of the MIF, and have already piloted this in Spain and Guatemala and applied it in Vietnam, Central America, and West Africa. CASE was also commissioned to develop an inequality policy toolkit, based on the MIF, for the German development agency, GIZ, which operates in 120 countries. 

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Policy Economics May 1, 2022

Tackling global poverty takes more than cash, new research points to the power of including psychosocial interventions—such as group problem-solving—alongside economic ones..

Dean Karlan

Christopher Udry

and coauthors

Michael Meier

To combat global poverty, no single tool or policy will be sufficient. Multifaceted approaches, ones that also address psychological and social obstacles, can have important impacts on the lives of the poor.

That’s the conclusion of recent research by the Kellogg School’s Dean Karlan , a professor of economics and finance, and Chris Udry , a professor of economics, who together direct the Global Poverty Research Lab .

Along with multiple collaborators, including the World Bank, Karlan and Udry worked with the government of Niger to conduct a randomized, controlled study that compared the effectiveness of several different social programs for thousands of households in Niger living in extreme poverty. “These are programs attempting to reach the very poorest people in the world,” says Udry.

The researchers were especially interested in understanding how psychosocial constraints, such as a lack of role models or support for business efforts among village peers, might create barriers to seizing economic opportunities. They wanted to know whether including components addressing these challenges in social programs—like group problem-solving sessions and sharing success stories—could improve overall outcomes.

“The literature suggests mental health, aspirations, and hope enable people to benefit from economic interventions and run with opportunities,” Karlan says.

Overall, the results from their study show that government-run programs that take a multifaceted approach to combating poverty yield significant improvements in economic and psychosocial well-being in extremely poor communities.

Importantly, the researchers also found that psychosocial components contribute to the economic impact of these programs and are especially important in improving their cost-effectiveness.

“It’s about working on multiple fronts,” Karlan says. “Not just saying, ‘here’s cash’ or ‘here’s training.’”

A Multifaceted Intervention

Previously, the Niger government established a permanent cash-transfer program and began rolling it out to about 100,000 of the country’s poorest households. The government then collaborated with the World Bank, Innovations for Poverty Action, and a team of professors including Karlan and Udry, to design and assess additional interventions beyond the cash transfers.

They looked specifically at a sample of 4,700 households already in the cash-transfer program. Households were assigned randomly to one of four groups. All households in the study received the monthly cash transfers, but three of the groups also received an extra package of benefits that included several new components intended to improve women’s income-earning potential. These included entrepreneurship training and a group-based savings fund in which participants could buy shares. In addition, each of these three groups received something unique: (1) a lump-sum cash grant beyond the monthly transfers, (2) psychosocial interventions, or (3) both the cash grant and psychosocial interventions.

To create the psychosocial intervention, the team worked with psychologists. Some of these interventions were geared toward problem-solving, interpersonal communication, and goal-setting.

“The [psychosocial] interventions work as well as giving people a lot of money but with lower cost, so the benefit-to-cost ratio is much higher.” — Dean Karlan

For instance, households took part in week-long life-skills training with role-playing, games, and case studies. Other components of the psychosocial intervention were aimed at shifting women’s cultural norms about work. For example, household members were invited to view a short film that illuminated people in extremely poor environments—like them—who had improved their economic situation significantly. As Karlan put it, “We wanted to establish role models and show what they did to prosper. The idea was to build hope and aspirations to support their motivation for income-generating activity.”

Then researchers measured economic, psychosocial, and empowerment outcomes, such as participants’ perception of control over decision-making and earnings, at baseline and 6 and 18 months post-intervention. They also collected data on the cost of these interventions to gauge benefit-to-cost ratios.

High Impact, Low Cost

The study yielded promising results.

Households that received a benefits package in addition to the monthly cash transfers showed improved outcomes on a number of measures, including improved consumption of daily household items, food security, business revenues, and women-led off-farm business activities and revenue.

Moreover, all three packages had significant impacts on multiple psychosocial outcomes. For example, women reported lower levels of depression symptoms and higher levels of life satisfaction and self-efficacy (the ability to achieve hoped-for results), as well as a heightened sense of social worth and higher future expectations for well-being for themselves and their children.

Six months into the study, households that had received both the cash grant and the psychosocial interventions showed the biggest economic impact, followed by the cash grant alone, and then the psychosocial interventions alone. But differences in impact among these three groups were small overall. And of note, the economic boon to households that had only received the psychosocial intervention continued to grow between 6 and 18 months, suggesting the ongoing value of this intervention.

“I didn’t expect the psychosocial elements to play as important a role as they do,” Udry says. “As an economist, I think about the conditions people face with access to factors of production like capital, labor, and land. So I’m seeing only now how critical these psychological and social features of poverty seem to be.”

The researchers also found that the cash grants had positive psychological impacts on their recipients, while the psychosocial interventions had a positive economic impact. This suggests that these interventions had broad effects beyond their expected mode of influence.

The benefits packages were largely cost-effective, the researchers determined, with total costs ranging from $263 for the package that included the psychosocial intervention to $584 for the one that included both psychosocial and capital interventions. The two packages with psychosocial components drove particularly high benefit-to-cost ratios. “The interventions work as well as giving people a lot of money but with lower cost, so the benefit-to-cost ratio is much higher,” Karlan says.

A Call to Action

The results suggest the effectiveness of both economic and psychosocial pathways to enhancing the welfare of extremely poor households.

The researchers are quick to note that there is no one-size-fits-all intervention: programs must be tailored to the communities they serve. “If you took the exact same program and did it in Ethiopia, it wouldn’t work the same way,” Udry says.

And yet, they argue that an approach that looks beyond just distributing money is likely to be successful in many places. Indeed, the researchers are awaiting results from other countries to continue to build support for their approach of using different, complementary keys to unlock potential and improve welfare.

Above all, they want the most effective interventions possible to make their way to the communities that need them—and at scale.

Professor of Economics and Finance, Frederic Esser Nemmers Chair, Co-Director of the Global Poverty Research Lab at Kellogg

Robert E. and Emily King Professor of Economics; Co-Director of the Global Poverty Research Lab

Sachin Waikar is a freelance writer based in Evanston, Illinois.

Bossuroy, Thomas, Markus Goldstein, Dean Karlan, Harounan Kazianga, William Parienté, Patrick Premand, Catherine Thomas, Christopher Udry, Julia Vaillant, and Kelsey Wright. 2021. “ Tackling Psychosocial and Capital Constraints Opens Pathways out of Poverty.” Nature.

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Poverty and Social Exclusion

Defining, measuring and tackling poverty, latest articles, home page featured articles, buenos aires 2017.

A recent report form the city of Buenos Aires measuring multi-dimensional poverty, using the consensual method, has found that in 2019, 15.3% of households were multi-dimensionally  poor, rising to  25.7% for households with children under 18 years of age. The method established will be used to measure nu,ti-dimensional poverty on an ongoing basis.

6th Townsend poverty conference ad

We are now delighted to offer you the presentation slides and video recordings of sessions across the three days, featuring formal presentations, interactive Q&As, networking opportunities and much more.

Child deprivation in EU member states, 2018

The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Steering Group on Measuring Poverty and Inequality has been tasked with producing a guide on Measuring Social Exclusion which references a lot of our PSE work.

Households in poverty: five case studies

Find out what it really means to miss out on what others take for granted and the deep impact this has on lives and opportunities. The PSE team have filmed with five families living in London, north-east England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Between them, they represent each of the following key groups vulnerable to poverty:

• single parents on benefits
• the young unemployed
• low-paid workers supporting a family
• adults who are disabled
• single pensioners .

All lack a range of the necessities selected by the public as essential for a minimum living standard in the UK today (see the full list of child and adult necessities in explore the data ). They are all also living on a low income. Using the consensual method for defining poverty that underpins the PSE: UK research, each household is living in poverty.

The following series of short films were recorded between late 2011 and early 2012.  The PSE team is very grateful to all the families who are sharing their experiences with us.

Living in poverty featured articles

Featured case studies, the johnsons story.

Renée is 40 and works long hours for low pay to try to provide for her four children, aged 3 to 14, and her 80-year-old mother.

Jennie's story

Jennie is 39 and unemployed. She lives with her three sons, all of whom have disabilities, in Redbridge, outer London.

Marc's Story

Marc is 19 and lives in Redcar in north-east England, a town where there are twelve times as many people claiming job seeker’s allowance as there a

The burden of the downturn that followed the 2008 economic crash was borne by those on the lowest incomes (see Burden of economic downturn taken by the low paid ). In addition, the Coalition government’s austerity measures and changes to the tax and benefit system will impact heavily on those on lowest incomes. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that the net effect will be a rise in both child and adult poverty levels (see UK poverty set to rise in next three years ). The government’s plans include cuts of £18 billion to the welfare budget between 2011 and 2014. While the introduction of Universal Credit should, in principle, increase the benefit entitlements of some households, these improvements are more than offset by other changes to personal taxes and state benefits, such as linking benefits to the Consumer Price Index rather than to the Retail Price Index (see Child and adult poverty set to rise by 2015 ). In addition, Universal Credit risks making certain groups significantly worse off, in particular single working mothers (see Welfare reforms could push 250,000 children deeper into poverty ).

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System Publications

The Enduring Challenge of Concentrated Poverty in America: Case Studies from Communities Across the U.S.

by The Federal Reserve System and the Brookings Metropolitan Policy program .

In 2006, the Community Affairs Offices of the Federal Reserve System partnered with the Brookings Institution to examine the issue of concentrated poverty. The resulting report, The Enduring Challenge of Concentrated Poverty in America: Case Studies from Communities Across the U.S. , profiles 16 high-poverty communities from across the country, including immigrant gateway, Native American, urban, and rural communities. Through these case studies, the report contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of poor people living in poor communities, and the policies that will be needed to bring both into the economic mainstream.

In the Richmond Fed District, this special report looks at the factors that give rise to high-poverty neighborhoods in West Greenville, NC and McDowell County, WV and the challenges they face.

Poverty data highlights include:

West Greenville, N.C.:

• The neighborhood poverty rate was more than 40 percent, twice as high as the poverty rate for the Greenville MSA.
• One in five households was headed by a single parent.
• Nearly 60 percent of children lived in poor households.

McDowell County, W.Va.:

• The poverty rate was 38 percent.
• One in every three residents aged 18 to 64 does not have health insurance – the lowest rate of coverage in West Virginia.
• Of the county’s working-age population, 40 percent claimed a disability of some kind.

Additional Resources

The Enduring Challenge of Concentrated Poverty in America

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Speaking out: case studies on how poor people influence decision-making.

1 documents

176 pages long

Languages: English

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Many poor people around the world are denied the opportunity to have their say. Politics generally works well for those in power, but those in poverty are often excluded from forums that directly affect their welfare and so are unable to hold decision-makers to account. Speaking Out describes different ways to strengthen the participation of people in poverty so that they become active citizens and shape policy decisions. The book includes different approaches, lessons learned, and useful case examples on issues ranging from local community budget monitoring to popular mobilization and media work. The chapters show that addressing a lack of ability to speak out against injustice, as well as the more tangible issues, can make a big difference to people’s ability to achieve greater well-being and get out of poverty, and so work towards a point where poor and marginalized women and men are more able to access their rights. The case studies in this book are also available as individual papers.

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• van der Gaag, Nikki
• Rowlands, Jo

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Case Study: Living In Poverty

Thanks to Brian Page of Reading High School in Reading, Ohio for this guest submission. Brian pointed out this "Cliff Effect" problem this summer and was determined to create a case that would demonstrate its impacts on financial decision-making and how it can trap people in poverty. 

Here's Brian's description, with a link to this case study:

In the United States, the poor are staying poor and the rich are staying rich at an alarming rate . A silver bullet solution does not exist, but many of us are on the ongoing lookout for ways to help our students avoid slipping into the poverty trap when they graduate.

I recently wrote A Case Study on Living in Poverty . The goal was for students to catch a glimpse of what it’s like for a single parent of one child in Cincinnati, Ohio to escape the Cliff Effect .

Using job postings in the Cincinnati area, the case study reveals that it makes more financial sense to take a job at McDonald’s for $8.43 an hour than take a job at Walmart for $13.08 an hour. Both positions offered comparable benefits. I spoke on the phone with the Medicaid offices, as well as SNAP and other government assistance offices to ensure I fully understood the income thresholds necessary to receive government assistance, and what occurs when someone crosses the income threshold to receive assistance.

The case study served as a precursor to a PBL (project-based learning) career assignment. My goal is for students to better grasp the consequences of failing to further their education in college or a trade school. Please have a peek at A Case Study on Living in Poverty !

Thank you, Brian

-----------

Interested in case studies? Check out our case studies here with more on their way later this month too!

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Case Study from Asia in Addressing Human Poverty

July 27, 2015.

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