This review summarizes the literature on disability and its relationship to pverty, including education, employment, income, and access to basic social services. Despite the dearth of formal analysis, it is clear that in developing countries, as in more developed areas, disabled people (and their families) are more likely than the rest of the population to live in poverty. It is a two-way relationship--disability adds to the risk of poverty, and conditions of poverty increase the risk of disability. Disability in developing countries stems largely from preventable impairments associated with communicable, maternal and perinatal disease and injuries, and prevention has to remain a primary focus. An increasing emphasis on community-based participatory rehabilitation reflects growing recognition of the inadequacy of past offical programs, particularly involving specialized and exclusionary institutions.

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Poverty and disability : a survey of the literature

A recent edition of this Journal (Volume 16, Part 2, April 1987) was devoted to a number of articles on the definition and measurement of poverty. Surprisingly, perhaps, this did not include any specific discussion of gender differences in the causes, extent and experience of poverty. But such gender differences do exist, though they are often obscured by much research on poverty. Our initial response to the special edition on poverty was to write a reply discussing how the various contributors had ignored the issue of gender. But women cannot simply be ‘added in’ to existing analyses; instead a different analytic framework is required. This article therefore begins by looking at some of the widespread evidence of the economic disadvantage of women compared with men. We then go on to discuss why it is necessary to focus on the gender dimensions of poverty. We argue that this involves far more than simply disaggregating data to produce statistics about the situation of women. Rather, this focus leads us to explore the structural causes of women's poverty and the gendered processes in the labour market, welfare systems and domestic household which interact to create and maintain that disadvantage. In the final section we consider some of the important conceptual and methodological issues which must be tackled if we are to find ways to investigate and measure poverty which are not gender-blind.

Gender and Poverty

Although widespread poverty in old age has been recognized in Britain for at least 100 years, research on age and ageing has tended to concentrate on individual adjustment to old age and in turn, on narrow functionalist explanations of depressed social status. The elderly have been treated as a homogeneous group facing common problems. In contrast, an approach to ageing based on political economy will examine the relative social and economic status of different groups of elderly people as well as the relationship between the elderly and younger generations. Thus it is argued that poverty in old age is primarily a function of low economic and social status prior to retirement and the depressed social status of the retired, and secondarily, of the relatively low level of state benefits. Social policies which have failed to recognize inequality in old age and the causes of low economic and social status have therefore failed to tackle the problem of poverty and low incomes. The starting point for policy-makers should be the labour market and the social relationship between age and the labour market.

/pdf/towards-a-political-economy-of-old-age-1fzikovew4.pdf

Towards a Political Economy of Old Age

This article examines in detail some recent data on the living standards of elderly people. It is argued that poverty is related to low resources and restricted access to resources and therefore the article includes summarized information about a wide range of benefits and services. Questions are raised concerning the various social policies and processes which have contributed to the creation of poverty and dependency in old age. The growing importance of retirement is singled out for attention as one significant factor contributing to the depressed social status of the elderly, and as part of the general tendency in British society to devalue the worth of elderly people. It is this social relationship between age and the labour market which deserves attention from policy-makers, who have tended to concentrate on the consequences rather than the causes of dependency.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/0A642878BE0339B77B1073ABDE1FD46B/S0047279400009545a.pdf/div-class-title-the-social-creation-of-poverty-and-dependency-in-old-age-a-href-fn01-ref-type-fn-a-div.pdf

The Social Creation of Poverty and Dependency in Old Age

Publisher Summary This chapter describes unemployment in the long run. It presents the time path of unemployment in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. There is an upward trend for unemployment in the United States; but in Europe, there has been an astonishing growth with unemployment rising in all but one of the last 15 years. This explains why the unemployment rates are so different for different groups of people in society. For example, unemployment rates are typically higher for young people than for older people. They are also higher for the unskilled, for blacks, and for workers in certain industries. These differences are closely related to the different rates of turnover of the different groups. To explain unemployment, three main types of model are constructed. The first of these is based on supply and demand and assumes that without government intervention these are, in the long run, equal. However, even without wage regulation there may be excess supply of labor and involuntary unemployment may persist because of the wage-setting behavior of monopsonistic firms or of monopolistic unions or because of bargaining between the two. Thus, second set of models has wages set by firms, and the third has wages set by unions.

Michael Stewart

Papers

The causes of poverty