Population and poverty

Poverty has often been seen as a purely rural problem but for many developing countries, the pervasive nature of urban poverty constitutes an enormous challenge for policy makers and their development efforts. Poverty reduction tools and approaches that have been developed for rural poverty reduction cannot be replicated in urban areas.Hence, understanding the nature of urban poverty as well as having accurate data that presents its dynamics, trends and conditions is vital.
Kiandutu slum is arguably the largest informal settlement located outside Nairobi city. It consists of a poor people who to live in abject poverty.
The study seeks to: examine poverty reduction interventions employed in the study area, identify actors involved and their specific roles in poverty reduction, assess the challenges facing poverty reduction interventions and make recommendations towards urban poverty reduction.The study will use questionnaires, interview schedules, observation and photographs to gather data. Data will be analyzed quantitatively (SPSS and Excel) and qualitatively (Narrative) and results presented using tables, graphs, pie charts and photographs.

Health care can be expensive for the un-insured, often constituting a potential poverty trap. Urban India is particularly vulnerable to this possibility given the greater demand for health, absence of a structured health care system, overburdened public institutions, ubiquitous and unregulated private health care market and the generic paucity of public funds. Using nationally representative household level data at two time points, this paper computes the degree and depth of impoverishment from out of pocket medical expenses, and its variation across states and select socio-economic characteristics. Roughly 6 percent of the urban population or about 18 million people were impoverished entirely due to out of pocket medical expenses in India. There were substantial inter-state variation in incidence of this burden and all but one states display an increase in the degree of impoverishment between 1995-96 and 2004. The depth of poverty also registered a threefold increase between the two periods. Urban Muslims, scheduled caste, casual labour and lower middle income households were easily the most vulnerable to the financial implications of ill-health.

Household debt is now an issue of concern for policymaker in Thailand
because its fallout will have a far-reaching impact on the whole economy.

According to survey in by the National Statistical Office year 2004, household debt was 104,571 baht and increase to 136,562 baht in year 2011. This concern should be taken seriously, particularly if households are not able to determine their ability to service debt causing them to over-borrow especially in agricultural household.

The purpose of this study was to factors that affect household debt in Kanchaburi KDSS. The total number of households for this analysis is 10,837 households were included in the analyses, in which Binary Logistic Regression and Adjusted Probability technique were employed.

Results showed that the number of household member, vehicle ownership and use land for agriculture & livestock have a positive relationship with household debt while receiving remittance money have a negative relationship.

Furthermore, results showed households with vehicle are in debt about
73% of the households. Interestingly, that use land for agriculture & livestock are in debt about 75% of the households while household that do not use land for agriculture & livestock are likely to be in debt only 55%. Hence, those households associated in agricultural sector are in debt

In order to fill the research gaps in rural wealth data, researchers are increasingly measuring assets as a substitute for monetary data. Most of this research utilizes assets data as an explanatory variable that proxies for socioeconomic status. This paper uses asset data from rural Malawi as an outcome variable. The analysis compares the two most cited methods for calculating the wealth index, 1- the principal component analysis and 2- the unweighted fraction of total assets owned. The paper measures changes to wealth index levels and poverty transitions of 996 households from the 2004, 2006, and 2008 waves of the Malawi Longitudinal Study on Families and Health. A fixed effects model is used to control for unobserved heterogeneity while investigating the impact of household characteristics, including the timing of welfare program participation, on the levels of household wealth. The findings reveal a few substantive differences between wealth index methods. Consistent with the literature, being married, having a larger household and parental schooling are positively associated with the wealth index score. Among welfare programs, participation in an agricultural input subsidy is positively associated with the wealth index score and this association is stronger when using lagged year measures for program participation.

Brazil has experienced an economic development and achieved in 2012 the sixth position in the World economy ranking. As a consequence of economic growth, the Federal Government has invested in social policies that attempt to mitigate extreme poverty in the country. Policies such as "Bolsa Família", "Light for All" and "PAC - Growth Acceleration Plan" were proposed to increase family income and infrastructure, especially in urban areas. However, several Brazilian cities, such as the Amazonian ones, which have grown since 1980 considering the Region an urbanized forest, reproduce structural problems. According to 2010 Census, the urban population in the region grew by 36.6% between 1980 and 1991, 30.3% between 1991 and 2000, and 18.8% from 2000 to 2010. In 2010, 93.3% of the Brazilian Amazon cities were considered small in terms of population (less than 50,000 inhabitants), and concentrated 39% of the total urban population of the region. In this sense, we intend to discuss in this paper the situation of urban space in the Brazilian Amazon in terms of infrastructure and socio-economic conditions, and the conditions of sustainability, using the city of Ponta de Pedras, located in Para State, as an example.

The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) contain a “wealth” of information on the health and demographic conditions of national populations in less developed countries. With the development of the DHS Wealth Index, a new avenue of analysis has been opened up to investigate economic status inequalities beyond those of educational attainment, residence and ethnic group membership. There has been a substantial limitation to this analysis in that the DHS Wealth Index is relative to the situation in each country at the time of the survey. Each index has a mean value of zero and a standard deviation value of one. Thus specific scores and quintile values represent different levels of economic status between surveys and cannot be directly compared.
This paper describes a newly developed methodology for calculating wealth indexes comparable across country and time that allow for direct comparison of levels of economic status. The paper then proceeds to present inequality measures including Lorenz curves, Gini coefficients, and Concentration Indexes for wealth and for a set of demographic and health indicators. Finally, the paper determines the contribution of relative and absolute measures of poverty to progress in these indicators.

This paper examined out-of-pocket expenses incurred by women for availing maternal health care services at public and private health facilities. This article used data from a baseline household survey evaluating the impact of demand side financing vouchers on utilization and service delivery for maternal health care. The survey was conducted in 2010 among 3300 women who gave birth within previous 12 months from starting date of data collection. Information on costs incurred to receive antenatal, delivery and postnatal care services were collected. Findings reveal that the majority of women reported paying out-of-pocket expenses for availing maternal health care services both at public and private facilities. On average, women paid US$3.6 out-of-pocket expenses for receiving antenatal care at public health facilities and US$12.4 at private health facilities. Similarly, women paid one and half times more for normal (US$42.3) and cesarean deliveries (US$136.2) at private health facilities compared to public health facilities. On the other hand, costs for postnatal care did not vary significantly between public and private health facilities. Utilization of maternal care services can be improved if out-of-pocket expenses can be minimized.

Simplicity can be one of the motivations behind cutting the populace cake along the poverty line into two haves as ‘poor’ and ‘non-poor’. Poverty measurements, since based on the concept of poverty line, suffer from the following three limitations. First, people close to poverty line on either side are categorized as poor and non-poor though they do not have any significant difference in their living standard. Secondly, a slight change (rise or fall) in the line gives the poverty picture differently with millions of people going in and out of the poverty. Thirdly, the poverty line, being generally low, is often criticized as the line of starvation. To get rid of these limitations this paper proposes to replace poverty line with two lines – ‘line of sustenance’ and ‘line of affluence’. The paper revisits the axioms of poverty measure to evaluate the appropriateness of the proposed measure. The proposed measure turns out to be better in terms of continuity and monotonicity axioms. Being more coincident to the actual income distribution of the population, the proposed measure has more practical significance. An empirical illustration is carried out to demonstrate the advantages of the new measure.

The coastal zone of Bangladesh hosts over 35 million people where 3 million are extremely vulnerable to adverse effect of climate change. They lose working days for substantial increase of cyclone, flood, signal number 3 or above in the Bay. The objectives of the study were capacity development of poor fishermen and women and piloting of agriculture technology based Alternate Income Generation (AIG) activities for their livelihood improvement. AIG options were piloted among 450 fisher households in three coastal locations from January 2010 to April 2012 with equal representations from each. The piloting of AIG includes experience sharing, needs assessment, inputs distribution, providing skill development training and support services, monitoring and case study. Results showed that due to AIG options, annual total income of fisher families increased substantially. The increased income from fish sale is due to increase in fish price and additional fish from fish culture. Similarly, income from poultry and livestock have increased significantly compared to baseline. Result also showed the increased number of poultry and livestock possessed by fisher families during post-intervention period. Case studies clearly showed that additional income was accrued from AIG activities undertaken by fisher families.

The United Nations Declaration of 2000 adopted eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) designed to forge a new global partnership. Among the MDGs are: to reduce extreme poverty, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, and access to clean drinking water. The declaration set out a series of time-bound targets to track progress. The members of the United Nations have pledged to meet the set goals by 2015. However, to date, little empirical studies exist identifying the linkages among MDGs. This study examines the poverty-education-gender-access to clean water nexus using cross-sectional household-level data from Tanzania. In examining the nexus, this study presents a range of descriptive statistics as well as regression analysis.