Population and poverty

This paper deals with the “human” dimension of sustainability in Indian mega-cities, specially the issue of social equity approached through the housing requirements of the urban poor.

Indian mega-cities are faced with an acute shortage in adequate housing, which has resulted in the growth of illegal slums or squatter settlements. Since the 1990s, the implementation of urban renewal projects, infrastructure expansion and “beautification” drives, in line with the requirements of globalizing cities, have resulted in many slum demolitions, which increased the numbers of homeless people. Delhi exemplifies such trends.

This paper’s main objective is to appraise the adequacy of slum clearance and resettlement & rehabilitation policies implemented in Delhi in order to address the challenge of slums. Do such policies alleviate the problem of lack of decent housing for the urban poor, or to what extent do they also aggravate their situation? We combine two approaches: firstly, a statistical assessment of squatters’ relocation and slum demolition without resettlement over the last two decades, completed by an analysis of the conditions of implementation of the resettlement policy; and, secondly, a qualitative and critical analysis of the recently launched strategy of in-situ rehabilitation under public-private partnership.

Indonesia has implemented social protection to mitigate negative impacts of the crises and reduce poverty level. In addition, social protection in Indonesia is also intended to mitigate negative impacts of economic policies. The government claimed that those programs were very effective to cope with the impacts of the crises but many critics argued that those programs would only create dependency and lack of educational values, add more burdens to the state budget, ineffective in the long term to reduce poverty and vulnerability, and politicized because of miss-targeting, miss-management, and moral hazards such as corruption and abuse. This paper will examine the role of social protection programs in Indonesia, especially their role to mitigate the negative impacts of economic crises and the implementation of economic policies, by using Indonesian data and experience to examine social and demographic changes. The aim of this paper is to provide a holistic framework so that the multiple and often conflicting demand currently placed on managing poverty and other demographic problems issues as an impact of economic crises can be assessed systematically. This framework can hopefully resolve the Indonesian poverty problems and secure the Indonesia’s economy by reducing vulnerability, inequality and poverty.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are time-limited commitments made by governments throughout the world to reduce poverty and promote human development. The past two decades have witnessed significant improvements in the living conditions and health status of the world people, particularly the developing countries. The aim of this paper is to evaluate human development level in achieving MDG’s of 4 and 5 in the Western Africa countries and to explore its policy implications. Data used in this analysis are mostly taken from the WHO (World Health organization) for 2010, Population Reference Bureau for 2010 and Human Development Report (HDR) for 2006 and 2008. According to Roger’s theory on diffusion of Innovations which is a theory that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures in the complex atmosphere. With expansion advanced medical care systems, it is implied that we can see positive signs of reduction of mortality indices at the globalized World. Our result confirms it at the regional scale even with little progress in reduction of Child and Maternal Mortality rates. It involves evaluating possible solutions for human wellbeing at the World and Africa Continent as well by national and international authorities.

Over the past two decades a significant changes have occurred in the Indian economy. With the ongoing structural transformation, Indian economy has achieved a significant stature in the post liberalization area. Yet, one of the interesting unresolved puzzles encompassing this shift is the compromise in nutritional status and food security in the phase of an ‘apparent economic growth’. This study tries to examine the nature of ‘conspicuous consumption’ of households and its implication on nutrient intake and undernutrition in India, over the period 1993-2009.Here we will try to explore the changing consumption pattern i.e. from food to non food and the decline in calorie and protein intake, within the ambit of a structural shift in the economy.In this study we also try to inquire the main determinants of undernutrition by taking certain parameters like adequacy and choice. Consequentially we will apply the Engel curve analysis and logistic regression analysis for showing the nature of undernutrition and food security.

Timor-Leste has one of the poorest and fastest growing populations in the world and its economy is nearly entirely dependent on its non-renewable natural resources. 75% of its population lives in rural areas and depend on forests for their livelihoods. Timor-Leste has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world. With rapid population growth and a lack of sustainable population strategy, challenges such as unsustainable land-use, shifting agriculture and illegal cutting of trees for fuelwood or cash incomes will put tremendous pressure on the environment. Unfortunately preservation of the environment is not a national priority and existing laws and regulations concerning the environment are ill suited to the prevailing conditions in rural areas.
The analysis of this paper, based on primary data collected in the field in 2011-12, shows that there is a strong link between high fertility preference, poverty and forest dependency. While almost 93% of the households collect forest products for multiple puposes, 22% of households indicate that they use forests as safety nets. With forests holding potentials for poverty reduction, it is important to develop good environmental management strategies to ensure their sustainability despite an expanding population and strenghten their contribution to the national economy.

Although there is wide agreement that the promotion of family planning lowers fertility, it is not clear to what extent greater contraceptive use and smaller family sizes will enhance investment in human capital and economic growth or what are the consequences of unwanted or unintended childbearing on children’s life chances.
We inform this debate by analyzing data on fertility intentions and children’s anthropometric measures collected as part of an on-going Demographic Surveillance Site (DSS) in Karonga District in Northern Malawi. We applied Propensity Score Matching to assess the effect of ‘unintendedness’ on child growth.
This study analyzes the effect of prospective fertility intentions on the nutritional status of the index child and the siblings of the index child after one and two years using both data on retrospective and prospective fertility intentions.

Reduction in population’s tobacco consumption is one of the measures that can support the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. This study intends to explore how the population’s tobacco consumption can provoke or obstruct the achievement of Millennium Development Goals in Thailand. Existing secondary data from the national survey on Tobacco and Alcohol consumption by the National Statistical Office during 1991-2011and Health and Welfare Survey were employed. Descriptive statistics and bi-variate analysis were applied to describe trends of tobacco consumption among Thai population and its relationship with the achievement of each MDGs’ targets.
The results revealed that reduction in population’s tobacco consumption through application of tobacco control policies and strategies can partly provoke the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals in Thailand especially in term of poverty reduction, achievement of universal primary education, promotion of gender equity and women empowerment, reduction of child mortality, improvement of maternal health, and development of a global partnership for development. However, it still hardly fulfills achievement of combating HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases and ensures environmental sustainability.

In the past 50 years, Latin America observed a significant improvement in the living conditions of its population, reflected in better health and economic indicators. However, inequality in living conditions in these countries has been largely unexplored by the absence of economic data sets and health. This paper uses the adult height as a health indicator of living conditions during childhood and adolescence in Latin America. We use data from from demographic and health surveys (DHS) for eleven countries in the region conducted after 2000. The results suggest that although it has been a positive trend in nutritional status and living conditions over time, nutritional inequality seems to have remained constant over time, which has significative impacts on adult health, measure by adult heights.
Keywords: adult height, living conditions, nutritional inequality.

Agrarian development in China was basically characterized by contrasting stages of collectivization and decollectivization over the past six decades, and each resulted in sweeping social and economic changes. The lived experiences of rural women’s and men’s daily productive and reproductive activities in specific geographic settings, may have shaped their surrounding environment and vice versa. So far, research on the linkages between gender and the environment in rural China has received little attention and no empirical study at the village level has been carried out. Based upon an ethnographic fieldwork in an Inner Mongolian village, this article seeks to document the evolution of the gender-environment nexus and explore its determinants in larger processes over the past 60 years. A closer look at everyday experiences of local men and women indicates that the complex intersections of gender and the environment occurred in larger processes at the macro level, which were closely linked to the role of the powerful state. The dynamic relations were implicated simultaneously in shifting social norms and practices at the local level. This paper therefore suggests a holistic approach towards understanding of shifting and complex intersections, contributing to ongoing feminist debates on women/gender and the environment.

This work investigates the earnings mobility in Brazil, considering the period before and after the observed fall of inequality in the country. We used micro data from the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD), published by the Brazilian Bureau of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), from 1993 to 2007. We considered the trajectories of income for homogenous groups based on individual characteristics such as: date of birth, gender, race and schooling level. The estimation is done by age-period-cohort model. The combination of the characteristics of age and birth cohort emphasizes the role that education can have in higher income mobility, especially on the younger cohorts.