In recognizing that poverty is 'multi-dimensional,' contemporary policy discourses – drawing on scholarship on ‘networks,’ ‘exclusion,’ and ‘culture’ – have made important (if often underappreciated) steps to incorporate insights from social and political theory, but these...

The relationships between poverty and the environment are highly contested, debated and researched. The sustainable development agenda, advocated at the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development, brings these relationships to the fore. Environmental sustainability, alongside social...

We explore how to measure poverty over time, by focusing on trajectories of poverty rather than poverty at a particular point in time. We consider welfare outcomes over a period in time, consisting of a number of spells. We offer a characterization of desirable properties for measuring poverty...

The Stages-of-Progress methodology helps examine households' movements out of poverty and into poverty. More important, it helps uncover the reasons responsible for these movements, thereby feeding directly into policy formulation. I present the steps in this methodology, discussing briefly some...

Conventional poverty analysis is ill-equipped to answer questions concerning the future persistence of observed poverty. Are those observed to be poor at a particular point in time chronically poor, or are they simply in a transitory state? While a number of analysts have struggled with this...

Until recently the household was taken to be an undifferentiated entity for the purposes of data collection and social and economic analysis. Even where researchers want to look at intra-household differentiation it can be difficult due to inadequate individual level data on dietary intake,...

This working paper argues that disabled people are disproportionately amongst the poorest of the poor in all parts of the world, and that international development targets are unlikely to be met without including disabled people. Due to the severe exclusion of disabled people from all areas of...

Attempts to understand the causes of chronic poverty have largely centred on the concept of the poverty trap. In this perspective, the main focus is on the paucity of initial wealth or endowments, which under certain plausible conditions can create a trap from which a poor person will find it...