Showing papers on "Poverty published in 1970"

Violence against children

Abstract: This paper develops a definition and conceptual model of violence against children on the basis of a series of nationwide epidemiologic studies, public opinion, and press surveys. Culturally sanctioned use of physical force in child rearing, poverty and discrimination, deviance in bio-psycho-social functioning, and chance events are identified as causal dimensions of physical child abuse. The scope of the phenomenon and selected findings from the surveys are discussed and social policies aimed at primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention are suggested. Attention is drawn to massive societal abuse of children, which is a related but much more serious social problem.

Insurance Against Poverty

Abstract: Insurance Against Poverty Stefan Dercon (eds) UNU-WIDER Studies in Development Economics Oxford University Press, 2005 465 pp. ISBN 0199276838 Reducing risk-related vulnerability has moved up on both national and international development agendas, with major agencies such as the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank designing social protection programmes aimed at providing more secure living conditions in developing countries. Written by eminent economists, this book addresses the following three key questions: How important is risk for poverty? What lessons can be learned from studying existing, often informal, risk-sharing institutions for the design of broad-based social protection? What is the scope for designing new instruments for social protection? Alternating between theoretical arguments and case studies, contributions addressing the first question insist on the...

Poverty and health : a sociological analysis

Abstract: Poverty has always been linked to poor health and early death, and this link has been exaggerated by industrialization, urban crowding, and new medical technology. Modern Marxism, following on French revolutionary thought and later Utopian and socialist political tradition, claims to upgrade health and eliminate poverty by social reform without unusual expenditure. Current reports about wonderful health in Maoist-Marxist China are in keeping with this argument. We may await more precise understandings and validations from China while reading these ten detailed and truthful essays on the

The Great Society's Poor Law: A New Approach to Poverty.

Abstract: If a book which is deliberately preliminary and tentative can ever be called definitive, The Great Society's Poor Law is it. It is instant social history at its best. No historian of the antipoverty movement of mid-century America will ever be able to work without referring to it. No student of governmental intervention in social welfare nor any social policy critic can afford to bypass it. The book is in five parts: The first deals with the antecedents of the Economic Opportunity Act, its legislative history, and internal administration. The second part deals with the Community Action Program (CAP) as the mechanism for change and coordination in the provision of services to the poor. This part deals also with the \"national emphasis programs\"-Headstart, Upward Bound, Legal Aid, birth control programs, VISTA, etc. The third part deals with rural poverty; it discusses the impact of rural loans, of assistance to migrant workers, and programs for the Indians. The fourth part, a lengthy chapter, is a careful description and evaluation of the Job Corps. The book's purpose, always kept in the forefront, is to assess what was done, how, and why. The relationship between purpose and impact is probed continually, and the best estimates of cost and yield ratios are made available. While almost obsessively concerned with the imprecision of the data-and they are imprecise, as one who has been involved in the production of some knows only too well-Levitan shows how far one can go, when all is said and done, with the rougher forms of cost and benefit analysis. Levitan's work is careful and detailed. He obviously has looked at every important internal memo, evaluated every evaluation, checked every figure, listened to everyone in the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), and considered every criticism outside and inside the agency. He presents salient data as to poverty-linked characteristics, on funding levels and on their distribution among pertinent categories. The almost fifty text tables included pull together a profile of OEO activities (most not available elsewhere) and make, on the whole, a rather impressive record. Levitan's analysis of OEO's birth control program is a good example of how even rough cost and yield estimates can throw light on the direction of policy and, in fact, force it even when the personal proclivities and the political judgment of policy makers appear to militate against it. Here the facts are clear: the relationship between family size and the risk of poverty is reasonably established, the discrepancy between stated desires as to size of family and achieved sizes is known as being larger among the poor than the nonpoor, the low-income universe which could benefit from birth control services is known, the birth control technology well developed, and the program costs clear. On the basis of such data, OEO's first assistant director for research was able to call family planning \"probably the single most cost-effective anti-poverty measure.\" It is interesting to note-apropos of data limitation in cost-effectiveness analysis-that the finding held in spite of a full 100 percent variation in the per patient-year cost of providing services (Planned Parenthood-World Population estimates the cost at $35, while Levitan found OEO's cost $70 per patient year). In spite of such unusual clarity about the facts, OEO's administrators remained reluctant in entering the field, allocated only about $10 million to the program in four years, made it a \"national emphasis\" program only under congressional pressure and, once the program was launched, broadcast its availability through \"whispers.\" Levitan does not have much to say about the why of the reluctance: the judgment that birth control programs would reduce OEO's popular support undoubtedly played a part. In addition, Mr. Shriver and particularly, it is said, Mrs. Shriver, were not personally in sympathy Sage Publications, Inc.

Values as Social Indicators of Poverty and Race Relations in America

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to explore the usefulness of values as social indicators of underlying social problems. Using value choices of a national sample, an attempt was made to determine the extent and nature of cultural differences between groups differing in socioeconomic status and race. Since the publication of The Negro Family (the "Moynihan Report"), there has been lively debate and invective about the issue of whether or not cultural differences exist between the poor and the rich and between Negro and white. The issue of whether those living in poverty, particularly the Negro poor, are characterized by a distinctive "culture of poverty" has policy ramifications for programs of poverty-amelioration and community development. The findings reported here lend support to the idea that considerable value differences do distinguish the rich from the poor, but not Negroes from whites. For the most part, differences found between the latter disappear when socioeconomic position is controlled.

The Culture of Poverty: An Adjustive Dimension

Abstract: merely situational responses to extreme poverty and other forms of deprivation. The data in this paper, derived from interviews with a sample of the Negro population of Philadelphia, indicate that Negroes living in poverty hold attitudes that can be characterized as a "subculture of poverty." On the other hand, the data also suggest that such attitudes represent but one segment of the total range of attitudes and reference values held by this population, many of which are shared by the larger society. Furthermore, the evidence indicates that these attitudes serve to maintain the mental health of those living in a severely disadvantaged social situation. [deviant behavior, Negro, poverty]

Mothers in Poverty: A Study of Fatherless Families

Abstract: Professor Kriesberg explores in this book the many myths about the poor, the welfare dependents, and the husbandless mothers. The evidence marshalled does not support the idea that people continue on welfare generation after generation, that the children of broken families have disrupted marriages themselves, that the poor seek out public housing and public assistance because they prefer such dependency, or that husbandless mothers all have lower educational goals for their children than do married mothers. Beginning with major theoretical issues, Kriesberg developed hypotheses about the life of the poor and culture of poverty; the hypotheses were tested with data from a study of families in public housing projects.

The Determinants of Child Labour and Child Schooling in Ghana

Abstract: This paper investigates the main determinants of child labour and child schooling in Ghana, with special reference to their interaction. The study provides evidence on the impact of poverty and quality of schooling on child labour hours, taking into account their potential endogeneity. The exercise distinguishes between cluster poverty and household poverty in the two‐stage Heckman estimation procedure. In addition, it relies on a set of non‐common regressors to identify the child labour hours regression from the selection equation. Other methodological features include simultaneous equations estimation of child labour, child schooling and poverty, taking into account their joint endogeneity. The empirical results contain some evidence of sharp rural urban differences, thus, pointing to the need to adopt region specific policies in enhancing child welfare. However, rural, semi‐urban and urban Ghana agree on the effective role that improved school attendance can play in curbing child labour.