The United Nations and other aid agencies are calling for aid to be more than doubled so that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) can be achieved by 2015. Unfortunately, as this paper shows, many important donors currently distribute their aid in ways that are not consistent with the MDGs....

This paper introduces the ways in which the poorest are defined, conceptualised and counted, and attempts to identify the characteristics that make such poverty intractable in the face of policy. We apply the concepts of absolute and relative poverty, as well as those of poverty depth, breadth...

For the poorest people, low level of access to basic services is both a cause and a consequence of their poverty and deprivation. A set of interacting factors means that supplyside and demand-side problems deny them access to health, education, water and sanitation services. Demand-side...

We consider how social movements in South Africa and Peru rework poverty as a domain of policy intervention. National 'mappings' of social movements reveal that 'poverty' is rarely central to movement framings challenges they address. This contrasts with government's justification of policy in...

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,...

As the main focus of poverty reduction activity in poor countries, the PRSP approach has the potential to make a major difference to chronic poverty. This paper examines the ways in which PRSPs treat chronic poverty and their potential to make significant impacts on it.Many recent reviews have...

Initial work done by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC) suggests that the tightest possible definition of chronic poverty would be intergenerationally transmitted (IGT) poverty. However, while this concept has been widely used in a 'developed' country (particularly American) context,...

This paper provides an overview of conceptual understandings of, and methodological research issues on, the relationship between chronic, or long-term, poverty and processes of migration. The paper presents a framework to enable an analysis of social relations and processes of exclusion, and the...

The paper explores the relationship between old age and chronic poverty in the developing world, and the implications of this for achieving global targets for poverty reduction.For the majority of the world's older people, the meaning of old age is not a chronological definition but the changing...