Many prior studies find significant cross-sectional positive ordinary least squares (OLS) associations between maternal human capital (usually maternal schooling attainment) and children's human capital (usually children's schooling, but in some cases children's nutritional status). This paper...

The distinction between transitory and chronic poverty has been highlighted in the research conducted by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre. While estimates of the incidence of poverty obtained from sample based studies provide insights into the prevalence of poverty and its severity at a point...

This paper examines the fracture points, or areas of weakness and failure, in social policy formation - from agenda setting through to policy formation and its legitimisation. It suggests why it is that despite clearly identified severe and widespread problems, which have been shown to drive and...

Land redistribution is often seen as a powerful tool in the fight against poverty in areas where a majority of people are rural-based and make a living mostly, if not entirely, off the land. In Southern Africa, landlessness due to the asset alienation that occurred during colonial occupation has...

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...

This paper examines recent contributions to the analysis of poverty, particularly those emphasising the constraints on the poor posed by social relations and institutions that systematically benefit the powerful. It proposes an analytic framework for study of the causes of poverty, responses to...

Resilience is an increasingly popular term employed in child development and international development discourse. Applied to childhood poverty, poverty over the life course and the intergenerational transmission of poverty, the resilience of boys and girls may be considered as serving as a...

Households change composition frequently through births, deaths, divorces, marriages, the departure of children from home, and other compositional changes. Consequently, a large number of people undergo some fundamental change in household arrangement during relatively short periods of time....

This paper follows the principles of the ‘bottom-up’ approach to adaptation. It believes that one of the starting points for adaptation to climate change should be the present. The focus should not just be on scenarios of the future; combined with this should be analysis of present...

HIV/AIDS is both a cause and a symptom of chronic poverty and requires new and innovative policy instruments and institutional structures to address its impacts. Focusing specifically on orphans, vulnerable children and the elderly, this paper explores the appropriateness of different social...