Poverty Studies

This dissertation examines the extent in which state policies have affected the Roma in Turkey by looking into the reasons for their poverty and social exclusion as well as into the survival mechanisms and livelihoods strategies they have employed as a response. The study addresses the situation of the Roma from the perspective of the approach the Turkish state has had on ethnicities, the accession conditionalities imposed by the European Union and the neo-liberal policies implemented by the government after 2002. Broadly, the study illustrates the impact of long-lasting structural invisibilization towards the Roma as well as the manner in which the Roma have positioned themselves and negotiated with power in order to survive. Having in mind that the first official measure of the 2010 Roma Opening initiative of the AKP Government was the provision of housing, the dissertation focuses particularly on the housing policies that have had an impact on the livelihoods strategies of the Roma in Turkey: the “housing for the Roma” [Tr. Roman konutları] initiative and the urban regeneration [Tr. kentsel dönüşüm] projects run by the state authorities all over Turkey. The research shows that, while the Roma have been long affected by the invisibilisation and exclusion of the state policies, the provision of housing alone, without accompanying measures and without taking into account the needs and specificity of the communities targeted, does not have the potential to get the Roma out of poverty nor to tackle their exclusion. Moreover, the demolition of the gecekondu settlements and its consequential displacement sets poor Roma on a more vulnerable path from which they have difficulty to recover and to find sustainable livelihoods strategies.

"This book took around a decade to write. Three of us, coming from different
locations and contexts, coming from different histories, experiences and lived
lives, coming from different intellectual traditions, shared some initial thoughts. Our sharing showed that we were confronted with a related kind of problem: what do we make of the contemporary, a contemporary marked by a certain incitement to discourse on globalization. What indeed is globalization? What do we mean by ‘global’? What do we make of ‘global capitalism’? What indeed is global capitalism? Where then is the ‘local’?
Given that Marx provided an analysis of nineteenth century European
capitalism, what conceptual handles or windows can Marx offer today? Can he offer anything? Would we at all turn to him for an understanding, interpretation and explanation of contemporary capitalism? Or would he be irrelevant in the Southern situation, given the birth of his theory in a western context? Do concepts travel? Would his concepts be relevant in another culture and another time? How do we conceptualize Marxism in the South, if at all and why at all? Could we at all conceptualize a Marxism that was turned to the South? How would we attend to the scorn of the cultural difference theorist who would say that Marxism’s western moorings impart a certain incommensurability to its invocation in non-Western realities? How would we do away with the near religio-scientific belief of the Universalist who would see the possibility of a ‘core applicability’ of Marxism transcending (non-Western) particularities? Would a rethinking of Marxian questions and concerns in the South mean a radical displacement of much of Marxism; such that Marxism becomes aboriginal —that is, both, ‘other than the original’ as also ‘singed with a certain aboriginality’?
Would it also mean a rethinking of the very description and meaning of the
South that has hitherto hegemonized us? Would it mean a rethinking of the
category of ‘third world’—third world as the representative category for any
description of the South? Taking off from questions as to why and how Marxism could matter in the context of the South, it appeared to us that both western Marxism and third world as is usually deployed in classical and conventional renditions are deeply problematic. Even the bulk of the so-called critique of modernity, whether they be postmodern or postcolonial, falter when faced with the third world. A culturalist critique would tend to forget capital; and an economistic critique is inclined towards putting aside the question of modernity. Resultantly, the specificity as also the burden of the history and the experience of colonial modernity and the evolution of (indigenous) capitalism, all of these in their overdetermined and contradictory imbrications, remain unaccounted for at a more theoretical level. This theoretical problem, by no means peculiar to Marxism, acquires additional urgency in a Marxian space since western Marxism has never really faced up to the category of third world; nor has it come face to face with the experience–language–logic–ethos of the South. Rather, it has often turned away from this encounter; such a turning away is perhaps reflective of an implicit Orientalism. Whether in the North or South, wittingly or unwittingly, irrespective of ideological dispositions, the efforts to rethink Marxism and third world in the Southern space have, with few exceptions, remained forestalled. For us therefore, the more pressing questions are related to how Marxist theory would encounter the specificity of third world. In turn, how would third world encounter Marxism? How do the understandings of Marxism and third world change because of this encounter? This book deals with these questions; it proposes in the process the inauguration of a counter concept ‘world of the third’.

This work thereafter fleshes out a description of world of the third, and of its
encounter with global capitalism, with India as the site of analysis and in the
context of the present phase of globalization. Indeed, globalization has been a recurring sub-theme in the encounter of the ‘rest’ with the West and the current phase represents another passage, with its own unique effects, of this ongoing encounter. By virtue of its unique disposition, Marxian questions tuned to world of the third enunciate a quite different trajectory of explaining and understanding this encounter.

However, one may still ask: why invent a new name world of the third? Does
a change in name solve the problem? Naming has to it a colonizing hue, especially in the South. Nobody has borne the consequences of the cultural imputations involved in naming more than the Southern people. Southern thinkers, to name a few, Franz Fanon, Che Guevara, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Krishnachandra Bhattacharya (author of Swaraj in Ideas) have struggled against the stifling grip of markers coming to their homeland like metonymic meteors from the west. For them, the purpose of social struggles, including the struggle for freedom, was never to just win political independence, but to see to it that the emerging structure–subject is free from the scourge of concepts the West deploys to describe the South (one such concept being ‘third world’). That is also to free oneself from the Orientalist grip, that merged with that of a Capital-centered view to prescribe a fixed path of modernization, progress or development for ancient civilizations. It was to be, for them, a struggle over mindsets-attitudes,
over worldviews; decolonization meant decolonization of minds; swaraj meant ‘swaraj in ideas’. That is why language (whether oral, written, practical or aesthetic) was so important to all these thinkers and resultantly their struggles became a struggle over the structure of symbolic systems as also over subjectivity. These currents of intellectual and social opposition to discourses of colonialism and then modernization including development have subsequently taken various forms and have continued to redefine the intellectual and practical landscape of social resistance and at times social reconstruction in the South. In many ways, these intellectual and social movements talk not simply to their own people, but to the West as well by pointing out that what seemed obvious to the latter was only a particular construction of the ‘rest’ by the West. They argued that the lived
experience of the South could not be reduced to the conceptual frame (explanatory or interpretative) generated in and by the West. The problem is also of reducing (cultural, economic and political) difference to frames of discrimination; it is one of organizing worlds that are different in terms of step–ladder hierarchies, where one is not different from the other, but where one is either superior or inferior to the other (in this case it is all about reducing the difference that world of the third institutes into the global to the hierarchy of first and third worlds). The problem is therefore about being sensitive to a fundamental dissonance that has appeared as a result of the encounter of the West with the ‘rest’. In this context, the deployment of world of the third (as different and as outside) against the given of third world (as the lacking inside of the first world) is crucial.

Our endeavor takes us to a provisional conclusion: the foreclosure of world
of the third is produced through a foregrounding of third world. The hegemonic (here, global capitalism) is then a product of foreclosure (here, world of the third) and foregrounding (here, third world). Critiquing western Marxism and various other strands of ‘post’ thoughts for having missed this crucial mode and node of modernist thinking that motored the conceptualization of and intervention in the so-called third world societies, we offer an interpretation of how this conceptualization of and intervention in the so-called third world societies is a process constitutive of global capitalism.

Further, by defamiliarizing and denaturalizing the given of global capitalism
and third worldism (as also development–globalization), we propose a language of resistance premised on the return of the foreclosed world of the third. Consequently, resistance to the hegemonic cannot but be founded on the return of the foreclosed, on the return not of the third world but of world of the third. A world of the third Marxian approach thus not only provides a distinctly different language/worldview for analyzing the hegemonic, but in the same turn lays down the contours of a possible world of living beyond the hegemonic.

Finally, this work is not just about a dialogue between East and West, between South and North, between the global and the local, between world of the first and world of the third but also between Marx and Freud, between Althusser and Lacan. In the process, in addition, this work brings face to face two near-incommensurable traditions—the rationalist-humanist and the psychoanalytic—and see what productive dialogue or enabling moment can emerge from such an encounter. The dialogue with Amartya Sen (and John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum) is premised on such an encounter. In that sense, this book is also about a dialogue between Sen and Marx-Freud, between need and class, between positional objectivity and overdetermination, between capabilities–functioning–freedom and alienation."

Many intertwined factors contribute to sustainability in the desert settlements of Birdsville and Bedourie. Taking one factor, the commitment to, and achievement of, full employment for all local residents, this paper draws data from a larger research project ...

When we analyse the attitudes towards poverty, we will not learn about the real causes of poverty nor about the appropriate means of fighting against it. We will know how different types of people think about these questions and – indirectly-what they are willing to do to decrease or put an end to it. Our attitudes help us to explain the world around us and to find our way in it; they also combine to construct our identity, to defend our ego in certain situations, to express ourselves. Attitudes are behind our acts, they are the mediators between our values and our behavior. In a lot of cases there is a discrepancy between our acts and our attitudes, nevertheless attitudes give orientation to the behavior. Based on the attitudes of people, we can predict what kind of social politics they will support, how they would help poor people if they are rich and how poor people try to break out of poverty-if they try it at all. In this paper I will show the attitudes of European people towards issues such as the definition and causes of poverty, its extension and the necessity, responsibility and means of fighting against poverty.

Ihr Forschungsprojekt beschäftigt sich mit der filmischen Darstellung von Armut und gesellschaftlicher Randständigkeit. Hat der Film als fotografisches und narratives Medium ein besonderes Interesse an diesen, heutzutage auf den ersten Blick ja oft wenig auffälligen Phänomenen? Schon die Frage nach der Auffälligkeit ist interessant. Ich selbst stelle fest, dass ich die Armut auf den Straßen des Stadtteils, in dem ich wohne (Berlin Kreuzberg), ganz anders wahrnehme, wenn ich nach einer Reise aus einer Stadt, in der es weniger sichtbare Armut gibt, nachhause komme. Das eigentlich immer sichtbare Elend wird mir dann deutlicher bewusst, während der alltägliche Anblick von Flaschensammlerinnen, Alkoholikern oder Verkäuferinnen von Obdachlosenzeitungen bei mir auch zu einem Gewöhnungseffekt führt. Gleichzeitig handelt es sich bei diesen deutlich sichtbaren ja nur um die extremeren, öffentlichen Formen von Armut. Die meisten Probleme finden jedoch hinter verschlossenen Türen statt oder manifestieren sich vielleicht daran, dass Schülerinnen nicht mit den Kleidungs-oder Freizeitstandards ihrer Klassenkameradinnen mithalten können, weil der Vater arbeitslos ist und die Mutter nur einen Minijob hat oder so. Ich denke, dass der Film über eine ganze Bandbreite an Möglichkeiten verfügt, Probleme wie sozialen Ausschluss und Prekarität sichtbar zu machen. Die Fragen, die mich vorrangig interessieren, sind die nach den filmischen Mitteln und nach deren möglichen Effekten. Also: Wie wird Armut dargestellt, wie werden Geschichten über prekäre und ausgegrenzte Menschen erzählt und mit welchen Implikationen? Handelt es sich um individuelle Schicksalsschläge oder um politische und ökonomische Zusammenhänge, die filmisch aufbereitet werden? Wie gelingt es Filmen, die Kontexte in den Blick zu bekommen? Was können wir durch die Filme über die Gesellschaft, in der wir leben, lernen? Wie nah erlauben uns die Filme, den Menschen oder den Figuren zu kommen? Da mich dabei, wie gesagt, die gesamte Bandbreite interessiert, möchte ich mit meinem Team auch mit den verschiedenen Gattungen des Spiel-und Dokumentarfilms beschäftigen, und auch mit anderen und neuartigen Formaten wie etwa aktivistischen Webvideos. Jeweils scheinen mir die Gattungen und Medien unterschiedliche Potenziale zu besitzen, um Armutsphänomene zu reflektieren. Spielfilme können vielleicht aufgrund ihrer Dramaturgie und ihrer Figurengestaltung besonders zur Empathie mit den Figuren einladen, während Dokumentarfilme den realen Begebenheiten auf die Spur kommen und damit Wirklichkeitsbereiche für uns im Wort Sinn ent-decken können. Web-basierte Formate wiederum müssen aufgrund ihrer Kürze oft pointierter arbeiten, sind dafür aber meist in mediale Umgebungen eingebettet, die wiederum die Wirkung beeinflussen und durch die sie evtl. eine größere Reichweite bekommen und unmittelbar Diskussionen auslösen können. Anders gesagt: Ich glaube nicht zwingend, dass der Film als Medium von sich aus ein besonderes Interesse an den genannten Phänomenen hat. Aber ich glaube, dass er besondere Möglichkeiten aufweist, um uns damit zu konfrontieren. In welchem Maße und wie diese Möglichkeiten genutzt werden, ist Gegenstand unserer Untersuchungen. Je nach angelegten Kriterien ist das Material, das für die Untersuchung in Frage kommt, sehr umfangreich. Wie haben Sie die Filme ausgewählt? Der Fokus des Projekts liegt auf europäischen Filmen der Gegenwart und der jüngeren Vergangenheit, grob gesagt von den 1990ern bis heute. Mich interessiert, wie wir uns auf diesem Kontinent über unsere Lebensbedingungen und über die herrschenden Verteilungsungerechtigkeiten verständigen. Ein wichtiges Kriterium ist dabei, dass Armut, Prekarität oder Exklusion in den Filmen wirklich zentral thematisiert werden, also dass nicht nur kurz mal eine Obdachlose ins Bild gerät und dann wieder verschwindet. Es geht schon um den genaueren Blick darauf, um die filmische Diskursivierung verschiedener Facetten des sozialen Ausschlusses. Wie groß das Gesamtkorpus tatsächlich ist, wird sich wahrscheinlich erst nach einem Jahr Forschung zeigen, wenn wir als Gruppe systematisch mögliche Quellen wie etwa Festivalkataloge und andere verfügbare Publikationen ausgewertet haben. Momentan verfüge ich über eine Liste, die ich permanent erweitere, wenn mir relevante Filme begegnen, von der ich jedoch sicher bin, dass sie keineswegs vollständig ist. Das sind zur Zeit ca. 100 europäische Spielfilme zwischen 1991 und 2018 und etwa 50 Dokumentarfilme im selben Zeitraum. Natürlich können nicht alle Filme, die wir finden, gleichermaßen detailliert analysiert werden, aber wir werden

Manufactured Insecurity by Esther Sullivan is a gripping account of a predatory formation at the heart of the most popular form of private-market low-income housing in the United States: the mobile home park. The book reveals, through the combination of ethnographic exploration and theoretical analysis, the systematic evictions and dis-possessions that became the lived reality for millions of American mobile home residents and their correspondingly tenuous rights to a protected place and secured housing. By shifting between the daily spaces and difficult realities of residents in these parks during their expected and actual liquidation, and the variety of actors, powers, and structures that prosper from these realities, Sullivan powerfully exposes how precariousness and profit are two sides of the same coin of this housing formation while revealing its dreadful meaning to its inhabitants and communities. About 18 million low-income residents live in mobile home parks in the United States. With affordable housing diminishing, the mobile home parks have become the main way in which America accommodates its poor, and the expanding class of American working poor is the actual business model on which these residential parks are built upon. In these parks, residents are often both tenants and homeowners, with divided property rights that produce their precarious form of housing tenure. While notably 80% of residents own their mobile homes, only 14% also own the land on which their homes are placed. As such, residents in these parks are often only "halfway home-owners"; their households are placed on rented lots of land which are privately owned by others in a form defined as "divided asset ownership." This exposes residents to the vulnerability of renting a plot in a park that could be offered for sale and redevelopment at any stage, and from which they may be evicted, destabilizing their lives and abruptly destroying their slowly developed complex ecosystems of homes and communities. With a clear and thoughtfully composed analysis, Sullivan shows how the hardship of frequent expulsions inflicted on America's poor is not coincidental but the consequence of a sophisticated industry, which thrives and capitalizes on the needs of a deprived and captive population. Rather than being accidental, the reality of closing mobile home parks and the related expulsions of residents is the result of a complex and obscure system of technical, financial, market, and legal methods facilitated by a changing mix of national, state, municipal, and local actors and regulations, and by socio-spatial processes of segregation and stigmatization. More broadly, this reality of built-in precariousness is based on a neoliberal approach to urban planning and policy, which enables people to legally settle on a rented plot of land with their own home, while at the same time producing them as easily displaceable for the benefit of landowners and the urban planning agenda. This way, while land at the outskirts of cities is settled temporarily by rent-paying low-income residents who must also take care of their own homes, thus extracting maximum benefit for the land owners, this land could be easily cleared and redeveloped when the city grows and its value increases. This method is not only keenly adopted by local and national land markets but also by municipalities and urban planners for which, as noted by Sullivan, ‘almost any other land use is more spatially desirable than a mobile home park’ (p.65).

In the recent years, China has risen to become the largest bilateral trade partner with most of the African countries including Kenya. Though there exist several theories that are used to explain the determinant of trade flows between countries, few studies exist that focus on explaining the trade flows between Kenya and China. This paper therefore seeks to fill this gap using an Expanded Gravity Model (EGM). The paper uses panel data from 2000-2017 published in various databases from World Bank, IMF, Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), UNCTAD and other agencies/organisations to analyse the determinants of trade flows between Kenya and China. The Expanded Gravity Model (EGM) used in this paper has three equations for; Kenya-China bilateral trade model, Kenya's exports to China model and the Kenya's imports from China model. The results show that Per Capita GDP, Per Capita GDP Differential and population are the main determinants of the bilateral trade flows between Kenya and China. Infrastructure and political stability are found to be negatively affecting the Kenya-China bilateral trade. For Kenya's exports model, China's infrastructure, China's population, China's trade openness and Kenya's Per Capita GDP are highly significant in promoting Kenya's exports to China. From the Kenya's imports 2 from China model, China's population and China's trade openness are highly significant in determining Kenya's imports from China. Lastly, distance was found to be insignificant in all the three models analysing the Kenya-China trade flows.

Poverty, in terms of insufficient income, decreased significantly after the Second World WaI, in accordance with the economic growth in Greece. Since there were no comprehensive official programmes for eradicating poverty, this downward trend was interrupted in the mid-1980's and began to increase substantially at the end of that decade.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is India's (and the world's) largest employment scheme. While many analysis exist on its impact and implementation faults, scant attention has been dedicated to how political dynamics influence its implementation. This paper will try to fill this gap with evidence from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. It will argue that the implementation performance of the scheme has been fairly good, despite the abysmal performance of the state government with previous employment schemes. The key factor in determining such a shift was the political commitment of the state's chief minister.

A key contemporary issue in International Development lies in questioning the adequacy for using the Capability Approach in differentiated cultural contexts. This paper argues that the socio-historical construction of the Capability Approach has been mostly embedded in liberalism and individualism – which led to the acceptance and use of the concept in the Western world but also beyond, in differentiated contexts where the sole actions of individuals are explored as if they showed and revealed the full extent of the influence of social institutions or external circumstances.
As a result, neglecting the cultural aspects and the institutional factors shaping motivations highlights a consequent gap in the capability space which is illustrated in this paper through the case study of Kathmandu urban slums. It appears that the Capability Approach considers the freedom of choosing a life one’s has reasons to value as the main determinant of slum dwellers’ strive for self-realization. However, reasons for valuing a certain life over another engage with broader processes at the collective level.
Consequently, approaches to tailoring the concept of capability to different strands of International Development and Development Studies may encompass a common bias – a bias relating to the socio-historical construction of a concept which, in spite of its apparent generalizability, presents a range of risks as to how collective norms, identities and belief systems are incorporated in defining the lives people value and how they achieve to arrange these lives for themselves.
I conclude that future research should attempt at shifting the focus from an individual-based to a social-system-based investigation of what determines and influences people’s decisions and reasons for living the way they do.

In 20th century, amaranth has been rediscovered as crop that could defend vulnerable areas of the world from hunger due to its tolerance for drought and poor soil. It still constitutes a minor cereal crop in the global scale, but as a labor intensive and resilient plant that does not benefit much from pesticides or genetic modification but supplies high quality nutrition, it models an alternative to neoliberal pesticide-driven monocrop agriculture and factory farming. This paper rewrites the history of human relations with amaranth in one of its centers of origin, Tehuacán Valley (Puebla, Mexico) since the times of Aztecs, through its colonial demise, till its rebirth in Proyecto Alternativas, aimed at remediation of poverty due to drought. While doing this I transform Toledo and Barrera-Bassols’ (2009) concept of biocultural memory to consider this memory as a hybrid phenomenon formed through interactions between humans and plants and viewing plants’ adaptation strategies as “living thoughts” (Kohn, 2013).

Energy poverty remains a challenged concept without firm establishment in public policy on a national and international level. This paper addresses those still skeptical about the very idea of energy poverty and provides arguments to defend the concept against fundamental criticism. First, it is shown why energy poverty should be conceptualized, measured and tackled as a specific form of poverty. Secondly, conceptual confusions surrounding the concept are clarified, in particular the relation to fuel poverty and the difference between energy poverty definitions, measures and indicators. Further, a needs-based understanding of energy poverty is outlined.

Available on JSTOR:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/complitstudies.56.3.0487

ProjectMuse:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/735021

This article illustrates through a data analysis of “the archive” and of what Jordan A. Y. Smith has recently defined as translationscapes, the way in which “the planetary world-as-world” emerged in Romania through translation only as late as 1948. Since translations of literature, as defined by the polysystem theory, are “a most active system within a polysytem,” one can assume that local production in certain cultures is strongly dependent on imports.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/complitstudies.56.3.0487

Launched in 2011 in Rio de Janeiro, “Light Recicla”, an electricity access project, provides a wide range of benefits to low-income communities. It was launched because regularized electrical connections and waste of “free” electricity made bills a financial burden. The project promoted bill payment, recycling, reduced consumption while generating income, encouraging financial education. We describe the project history from its inception to its potential during major events such as the Rio 2016 Olympics.

From a social-scientific perspective, this paper addresses an overlooked dimension of material poverty, namely spiritual poverty or the lack of spiritual sensitivity, and calls it a psychological disorder. Religions link deep spirituality with a kind of "pov-erty," namely simplicity of lifestyle and generosity toward the needy; but none advocates the poverty of outright destitution. A fully psychological "spiritualogy"-built on Bernard Lonergan's analysis of human consciousness or spirit and consonant with the humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow and current psychotherapeutic understanding-explains the link between spirituality and poverty as a matter of personal integration and suggests interventions to address the corrosive epidemic soul sickness of the postmodern world, so different from traditional societies in which religion and culture intertwined and functioned effectively. Keywords Bernard J. F. Lonergan · Abraham Maslow · Income inequality · Poverty in religious traditions · Psychology of spirituality · Carl Rogers

This study examines the joint effects of ICT diffusion (composed of access, usage and skills), and foreign direct investment (FDI) on inclusive growth in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The study draws on data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, and the Global Consumption and Income Project for the period 1980–2019 for the analysis. The study provides evidence robust to several specifications from ordinary least squares and dynamic system GMM estimation techniques to show that: (1) FDI and ICT diffusion and corresponding components (ICT access, usage, skills) induce inclusive growth in SSA; (2) compared to its direct effect, FDI is remarkable in fostering shared growth in SSA in the presence of greater ICT diffusion, and (3) compared to ICT access and usage, ICT skills are more effective in driving inclusive growth in SSA. Overall FDI modulates ICT dynamics to engender positive synergy effects on inclusive growth. Policy recommendations are provided in line with the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Agreement and the projected rise in FDI in SSA from 2022.

Sărăcia se află pe lista celor mai importante provocări cu care se confruntă umanitatea la nivel global. Prin urmare, dezbaterile privind sărăcia la nivel teoretic, dar și implicațiile în plan faptic, sunt de un real folos în încercarea de a lupta contra sa, cu atât mai mult cu cât afectează atât persoanele incluse în această categorie, cât și comunitatea din care fac parte, cu grave efecte asupra societății în ansamblul ei. În acest context, utilizând analiza multivariată a datelor, ne propunem să observăm anumite caracteristici ale sărăciei în România prin gruparea regiunilor în funcţie de indicatori specifici acesteia. Acest demers va facilita conturarea unei imagini mai clare legate de particularităţile regionale ale sărăciei, cu accent pe mediul rural, respectiv cu potenţială utilitate şi în proiectarea politicilor publice de dezvoltare.
Poverty is on the list of the most important challenges facing humanity globally. Therefore, debates on poverty at theoretical level, but also implications on a factual basis, are of real use in trying to fight against it, all the more so as it affects both the persons included in this category and the community they are part of, with serious effects on the society as a whole. In this context, using multivariate data analysis, we propose to observe certain characteristics of poverty in Romania by grouping regions according to its specific indicators. This will make it easier to draw a clearer picture of the regional particularities of poverty, with a focus on rural areas, with potential utility in designing development policies.

Este volumen explora desde distintas perspectivas críticas los diversos modos en que los imaginarios simbólicos pueden contribuir a una mayor comprensión –racional y afectiva– de la experiencia de la pobreza y de las vidas precarias que la rodean o habitan en múltiples escenarios latinoamericanos. Compuesto de diecinueve ensayos originales que abordan esta temática desde el cine y la literatura de gran parte de Latinoamérica, el volumen invita a reflexionar sobre la compleja relación entre la realidad socioeconómica de la pobreza y sus representaciones. Todos los ensayos aquí presentes interrogan las posibilidades o los límites de las estéticas a las que recurren escritores y cineastas para abordar el problema de la pobreza. En conjunto, los artículos exploran una variedad de escenarios y personajes marcados por la precariedad, la marginalidad, la vulnerabilidad, la exclusión, o la violencia que acompañan o resultan de la inseguridad laboral, el desplazamiento local o regional, la frustración y la violencia de quienes se encuentran atrapados en barrios, ciudades o mercados que amenazan con eliminarlos o expulsarlos.

Resumen

En los Estados Unidos, el psicoanálisis se considera un lujo solo al alcance de quienes pueden permitírselo. Cuestionando esta suposición, la autora comparte su experiencia haciendo psicoanálisis con pacientes latinx en el “barrio” de Filadelfia para abordar problemáticas de clase y raza en la clínica. Este artículo sostiene que vale la pena disputar los supuestos comunes sobre el psicoanálisis, que a menudo es presentado como un tratamiento que solo se puede practicar exitosamente con pacientes de clase media y media alta. Con esta presunción, el psicoanálisis en los Estados Unidos se ha encerrado en un gueto. La desigualdad en el acceso al tratamiento psicoanalítico tiene implicaciones ideológicas y políticas. Examinando de cerca en una viñeta clínica las fuerzas psíquicas que subyacen al racismo, este ensayo busca reabrir una discusión para romper las fronteras invisibles que rodean los guetos en los que se encuentra el psicoanálisis. Contrariamente a la creencia común de que los pobres están tan consumidos por las presiones de la vida cotidiana que solo pueden beneficiarse de intervenciones concretas y centradas en los síntomas, este artículo demuestra que el psicoanálisis facilita la exploración de la dimensión inconsciente que sustenta comportamientos sintomáticos cruciales como el racismo, desatando un potencial emancipatorio

Abstract

In the United States, psychoanalysis is considered a luxury only available to those who can afford it. Challenging this assumption, the author shares her experience doing psychoanalysis with Latinx patients in Philadelphia’s “barrio” in order to address issues of class and race in the clinical practice. This essay argues that it is worth disputing common assumptions about psychoanalysis, often presented as a treatment that can only be successfully practiced with middle and upper-middle class patients. With this supposition, psychoanalysis in the United States has itself been ghettoized. The current inequality in access to psychoanalytic treatment has ideological and political implications. Examining closely in a clinical vignette the psychic forces underlying racism, this essay seeks to reopen a discussion so as to break the invisible borders surrounding the ghettos in which psychoanalysis finds itself. Contrary to the common belief that poor people are so consumed with the pressures of everyday life that they can only benefit from symptom-focused and concrete interventions, this paper demonstrates that psychoanalysis facilitates the exploration of the unconscious realm that underpins crucial symptomatic behavior such as racism unleashing an emancipatory potential.

Faced with an increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness and a system strained doing what it can to address the issue, service providers, shelter and housing providers, community members, faith-based organizations, and funders created "No Place Like Home, a Plan to End Homelessness for Porter County". The plan lays a foundation to retool the homeless service system to most effectively prevent homelessness and rapidly re-house people experiencing homelessness.

Microfinance has broadened rapidly since its inception in the late 1970s. However, scholars have divergent views on whether and how much it helps to lift the poor from the economic quagmire. This research investigates the assessment of the impact of participation in micro-finance. It is difficult to disentangle the impact on poverty reduction of microfinance as an anti-poverty intervention scheme and establish a causal relationship between participation and poverty indicators, because of unobserved heterogeneity and reverse causality problems. Using the 2009 data set, first, we estimated propensity scores for participation on several pre-treatment variables. We then matched clients and non-clients on the basis of these variables. Next, we estimated the average treatment effect, considering participation as a treatment, and participants as the treated group. Finally, we employed different matching methods to establish the robustness of the utilized methods. In addition, for the year (2007 and 2009) panel data sets, we used the fixed effect (FE) and random effect (RE) panel data analysis techniques to fully address the two major problems stated above. Although we found significant impact of microfinance on household productive assets, its impact on fixed assets and monthly expenditure is insignificant. The propensity score matching and the panel data analyses identified microfinance as having direct temporary effects on household productive assets but limited (no) effect on households' fixed assets and monthly expenditures.

The book highlights important urban development issues in Punjab such as urbanisation, slums, housing, poverty, urban governance, development, infrastructure/ services etc and suggests major reforms to improve quality of life in urban areas.

Recently, the policy community has been paying particular attention to Local Exchange and Trading Schemes (LETS) as potential bridges into work for the unemployed. Up until now, however, there has only been piecemeal evidence on whether LETS are effective in this regard. In this paper, therefore, the full results of the first comprehensive evaluation of LETS are reported. In order to feed into the'evidence-based policy-making'process, we evaluate whether LETS are effective first, as bridges into employment, second, as bridges into self- ...

Traditionally, much of the analysis of poverty has been on rural areas, but little attention is paid to urban poverty. Poverty is a huge concern among urban dwellers due to an average monthly income of GHS150 with an exorbitant basket of expenditure. Urban poverty is exacerbated by the lack of social capital coupled with increasing utility tariffs with a translated cost in production and processing activities. Urban poverty has a gender dimension due to the male-dominated household roles coupled with low or lack of assets' control by women. This has worsened the poverty situation among households as expenses are borne by males as head of the household. Poverty in urban Sagnarigu and Tamale is based on a lack of money or inability to meet basic household needs. Urban dwellers consider unemployment as poverty but still consider living in urban areas better compared to rural areas due to the availability of basic amenities such as toilets, access to portable drinking water and electricity. Safety net programmes and interventions are the remedies of urban poverty, which are largely concentrated in the rural areas. Emphasis on education is required especially among females since there is a cultural shift of emphasis to petty trading as a quick source of money. This has caused a further gap in girl-child education and by extension, adult literacy improvement.

Η ενεργειακή φτώχεια αποτέλεσε έναν από τους παράγοντες επιδείνωσης της θέσης των μικρών και πολύ μικρών επιχειρήσεων στην Ελλάδα, σύμφωνα με τα ευρήματα ποιοτικής και ποσοτικής έρευνας που διενεργήθηκε μεταξύ Μαΐου και Αυγούστου 2019. Αιτία της εμφάνισης και της επιδείνωσης της ενεργειακής φτώχειας είναι η άνοδος των τιμών του ηλεκτρικού ρεύματος (κατά 28% για τις μεσαίου μεγέθους βιομηχανίες και 177% για τα νοικοκυριά από το 2006 ως το 2017) και η πτώση των εσόδων των μικρομεσαίων επιχειρήσεων (ΜμΕ). Ως αποτέλεσμα, το 15% των ΜμΕ έχουν καθυστερημένες οφειλές σε λογαριασμούς ενέργειας (ΔΕΗ, φυσικό αέριο, κ.α.) Παρότι είναι αδύνατο να εξαχθούν αξιόπιστοι μέσοι όροι, εξ αιτίας των μεγάλων αποκλίσεων που προέρχονται από τα διαφορετικά μεγέθη και τις διαφορετικές δραστηριότητες, πολλές ΜμΕ καταβάλλουν ακόμη και το 66% του κέρδους τους για ενεργειακό κόστος (όσες δραστηριοποιούνται πχ στον κλάδο της εστίασης).
Με βάση τις απαντήσεις που έδωσαν 19 επαγγελματίες προερχόμενοι όλοι σχεδόν από διαφορετικούς κλάδους, ακόμη και σήμερα σχεδόν 1 στους 3 επιβαρύνεται με την αποπληρωμή διακανονισμών σε ληξιπρόθεσμα χρέη του παρελθόντος προς ενεργειακές εταιρείες.
Παρά το τέλος της οικονομικής κρίσης και ύφεσης, το σύνολο των ερωτηθέντων (100%) απάντησε ότι συνεχίζει να λειτουργεί υπό το ίδιο καθεστώς περιορισμών στην κάλυψη των ενεργειακών του αναγκών, όπως συνέβαινε και στο αποκορύφωμα της κρίσης, σε βάρος της ποιότητας των παρεχόμενων υπηρεσιών, των όρων ζωής και εργασίας του. Οι περιορισμοί αυτοί αφορούσαν και συνεχίζουν να αφορούν περιορισμένη ή ακόμη και καθόλου χρήση συσκευών κλιματισμού το καλοκαίρι, και θέρμανσης το χειμώνα, θερμοσίφωνα, λαμπτήρων φωτισμού, ενώ εντατικοποιείται η λειτουργία του υπάρχοντος παραγωγικού εξοπλισμού.
Σχεδόν 2 στους 3 συμμετέχοντες προτιμούν ένα σύστημα σταθερών κι εκ των προτέρων γνωστών τιμών για το ηλεκτρικό ρεύμα, απορρίπτοντας το σημερινό απρόβλεπτο καθεστώς συνεχών αυξήσεων. Από τις απαντήσεις των ερωτώμενων αναδεικνύονται τα κόστη που προκαλεί η πολύ κακή κατάσταση του κτιριακού αποθέματος (π.χ. το 69% των κτιρίων δε διαθέτει μόνωση), που επιβαρύνει τους λογαριασμούς της ενέργειας, ενώ το γεγονός ότι η έδρα των 2 σχεδόν από τους 3 επαγγελματίες δεν είναι ιδιόκτητη λειτουργεί αποθαρρυντικά για την ανάληψη του κόστους της ενεργειακής αναβάθμισης.
Συμπερασματικά προκύπτει ότι το ενεργειακό κόστος έχει εξελιχθεί σε μια σοβαρότατη παράμετρο του κόστους λειτουργίας, που ενίοτε υπερβαίνει ακόμη και το εργατικό και σε κάθε περίπτωση έχει οδηγήσει στην άνοδο της ενεργειακής φτώχειας.

Conditional Cash Transfer programs (CCTs) provide cash to poor families upon the fulfillment of conditions related to the education of their children. Even though CCTs have been increasingly expected to improve educational attainment – besides their proven impact on greater enrollment and attendance, it is not clear whether they have had any impact on education policies. In order to explore that, this article builds upon a comparative study of three programs: Opportunity NYC, Subsidios Condicionados a la Asistencia Escolar (Colombia), and Bolsa Famila (Brazil). The article concludes that, when it comes to policy-making, the link between CCTs and education policies has been weak, contrary to high international expectations.