Population and poverty

The mushrooming growth of squatter settlements/slums due to rapid pace of urbanization in the cities of the developing countries like Siliguri Municipal Corporation Area (SMCA) in India is the major concern for the researchers, policy makers and the governments. The area of such urban slums/squatter settlements are the place where the people struggling extremely to make a living. They also tend to suffer more from the lack of basic amenities, inadequate drainage, solid waste disposal facility, illness, infectious disease, etc. In recent times, the studies on Quality of Life (QoL) are of great importance because they demonstrate the demographic, social, and economic conditions of an urban poor particularly for squatters/slum dwellers that ranges from “bad to good”. So, the multidimensional condition of life of the urban squatters/slum dwellers needs to study the QoL to get a better understanding of their situation as well as to help the local government and other bodies for implementing, evaluating and monitoring the policies and programmes for the socio-economic development of the poor. The objective of the paper is to focus the socio-economic status and the assessment of QoL using a composite index in the inner and peripheral city squatter settlements of Siliguri Municipal Corporation Areas (SMCA). For modeling a composite inde

Our main interest is to study the determinants of health inequalities among Argentinean women and the access to quality health services by vulnerable urban women.We focus on the role of financial, economic and family characteristics in addition to the local health systems. We use data from two sources— a nationwide representative survey and a micro/targeted survey. Our micro survey goes deeply into many aspects of the lives of women in a medium size urban area in Norwest Argentina .This area belongs to a large northern region of the country that has been labeled as “critical” by the UNDP because of the serious problems it faces and the need to device innovative policies to improve living conditions. This new data set allows us to investigate issues that are not feasible to study with the current nationwide surveys. We obtain not only a detailed picture of the economic and social aspects but also data on health history (woman and youngest child), preventive practice/access to health services, evaluation of health providers, willingness to pay for health services/insurance, borrowing/lending experience. Our preliminary results show sharp differences in health outcomes/preventive practices according to location, income and occupation both within the country and the area increasing our understanding of the causality directions.

Improvements in the business environment in Amazonas State, which is located in the northern region of Brazil, have been strongly supported by federal and state actions such as credit increases and incentives to more dynamism in the retail, agricultural and industrial sectors. Consequently, the state’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has shown a continuous growth path since 2003, when its performance started to improve relative to national average. However, it is necessary to examine whether the living conditions of the local population agree with the precepts of sustainable development. This means that better infrastructure and local economic dynamism can generate much better living conditions and income for the population as can stimulate the predatory use of natural resources and deepening inequalities socioeconomic and environmental impacts from the growth model adopted by the region. This paper aims to analyze the living conditions of the population in Calha do Purus (sub region of Amazon state) in 2010.


Keywords: population, sustainable development, Amazon region, living condition

Despite the consistent effort to reduce hunger and poverty, a sizeable proportion of the population in India is living below the poverty line and 36% women and 34% men were underweight (IIPS & Macro International, 2007). Malnutrition and poverty form a vicious circle of poverty which needs to be removed through government intervention. In the context, using data from the national representative “level and pattern of consumer expenditure survey” (66th Round 2009-10) of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) we have tried to establish the association between nutrition status and household income. In order to take into account the heterogeneous effect of the calorie intake across the income distribution and endogeneity of the calorie consumption we have applied instrumental variable quantile regression. Regression result confirms the heterogeneous impact of per-capita calorie intake across household income distribution. Result shows that the marginal effect of per consumer unit calorie intake on income decreases with the increase in income. Calorie intake elasticity of income gain is 2.077 at the lowest 10th quantile than the 1.755 at the highest 90th quantile of income distribution. Study clearly shows that public intervention at the low level of nutrition intake will have relatively higher gain in income.

This paper aimed to construct an index which captures transitory wealth, having the ability to explain how fertility shocks affect wealth, while avoiding the well-known issues of using direct expenditures. Data was from the wealth module of the Family Health and Wealth Study 2010, involving six peri-urban sites from 5 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Using principal component analysis, 2 indices were constructed– a fixed asset score (FA) and a “middle-class index” (MCI), assumed to represent transitory wealth. Correlations between the FA and MC indices ranged from 0.177 in Ghana to 0.764 in Malawi. Variable Inflation Factor values were between 1.04 and 2.85, affirming independent measures of permanent and transitory wealth by the 2 indices. The MCI was positively and significantly associated with surplus income in Ethiopia and Nigeria-Ibadan, and positively but not significantly in Malawi and Nigeria-Ife. The MCI was found to be a statistically significant positive predictor of self-rated wealth measure and independent of FA. Results were also robust to controls for father’s education and family size. These findings suggest that the middle-class index is a viable alternative representation of transitory wealth more sensitive in predicting how changes to factors such as family size or health affect economic well-being.

According to Egyptian norms, children stay home till they get married and parents are expected to help financially in costs of their marriages. Hence it is important to study the relation between parent’s social class and their children’s early career social class.
This paper studies inter-generational social mobility from parent’s (root) household to stemmed children’s household with primary focus on wealth mobility as a stable measure of the economic status of households; not affected by fluctuations of income.
The Egyptian Labor Market Survey of 1998 and its panel of 2006 are used. Wealth index for each of the two consequent-generations’ households is constructed using principal components method utilizing information on key characteristics of the housing unit and ownership of assets.
The transition of social mobility is observed in 1998 for the root households and 2006 for the stemmed households using wealth mobility transition matrix. An in-depth analysis is performed to study the relation between the wealth index of stemmed households and their own as well as their parents’ socio-economic characteristics. In order to allow for the relation between parent’s wealth and children’s wealth to differ according to every social level, quantile regression is used at different percentiles of the distribution.

This study examines the relationships between poverty, defined as having income below the poverty line, perceived economic strain, and psychological distress among older Thai adults. Data were taken from the 2002 National Elderly Survey in Thailand. The sample included 21,417 older men and women aged ≥ 60 years. Multiple regression models were employed for data analysis and findings revealed that elderly poverty was significantly associated with perceived economic strain and psychological distress. After controlling for socio-demographic and health-related variables, perceived economic strain fully mediated the effect of poverty on psychological distress. Family support had a powerful buffering effect on the relationship between poverty and economic strain, as well as between poverty and psychological distress. Policy and strategies targeted at poverty and economic strain in late life, and filial support should be continuously promoted.

Over the years the level of poverty has gone down. Bangladesh is still striving to achieve middle income country status by the year 2021. In 2010, the level of poverty was 17.6% at national level which meant that 26 million people were living under extreme poverty. For estimating poverty we will use Cost of Basic Needs(CBN) Method. There are two types of measurement: One is food poverty line. Here a basket of food (eleven food items ) is considered. According to nutrition of 2122 k.cal per person perday, the quantities in the basket are measured. These households whose total expenditure are equal to food are considered to be the extreme the poor households. The upper poverty line : those household whose food expenditure is at level of food poverty line are considered to moderate poor households. Head Count Rate gives the estimate of the percentage of people living under poverty line.If we use CBN method, it is a process of counting the poor on consumption threshold. The national Gini Index of per capita income is as follows : 0.451 in 2000, 0.467 in 2005 and 0.458 in 2010. Since 1990, Bangladesh has been successful in achieving substantial reduction of poverty National poverty head count in 1991-92 to 2010 declined form 56.6% to 31.5%. Whereas extreme poverty rate declined form 41% to 17.6% over the same period.

It is theoretically argued that there is a strong linkage between migration and poverty. Migration can be treated as an alternative to improve individuals’ welfare and to minimize the risk of being prone to poverty. Many studies have found that migrants on the average better than non-migrants. However little is known to what extent that migration process can improve migrants’ welfare and to avoided poverty. This study wants to shed lights on that issue.

The empirical findings reveal the amount of wage received after migration is higher compared to prior to migration. Health and educational attainment plays a crucial role in determining the amount of wage received. In addition, as it is expected, formal sector offer higher increase in wage than informal sector. In contrast, the effect of gender disparity on wage is gradually decreasing over the years. The greater wage received by migrants’ worker after migration taken place has improved their welfare and put them far from poverty. The higher wage received by migrants’ worker could be translating into the benefit from migration could be utilized to improved their human capital investment. In addition, the wage surplus potentially can be used to assist new migrants.

This study aims to show how the policy and social development programs, instituted in the last decade in the country, were important for reducing poverty and income inequality and produce combined effects of other contextual factors, such as economic recovery and the enhancement of the Minimum Wage. There is an underlying assumption to this work: the decrease of the poverty and the improvement of social indicators in the 2000s, especially in areas historically most vulnerable could be the result of the combined effects of social structuring and universalist policies in education, health, social security and social development.
The focus of this study are the social policies of the last decade. However, it is important to highlight that, since its focus on poverty and social inequality reduction, was made a segmented cut according to the axes of the current policy of Social Development and guided in the structure of the system of Social Protection and Promotion, with an emphasis on Social Assistance, Food Security and Productive Inclusion.