You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A Financial Times Best Book of the Year A hardheaded book that confronts and outlines possible solutions to a seemingly intractable problem: that helping the poor often hurts the environment, and vice versa. Can we fight poverty and inequality while protecting the environment? The challenges are obvious. To rise out of poverty is to consume more resources, almost by definition. And many measures to combat pollution lead to job losses and higher prices that mainly hurt the poor. In Unsustainable Inequalities, economist Lucas Chancel confronts these difficulties head-on, arguing that the goals of social justice and a greener world can be compatible, but that progress requires substantial chang...
Equality of opportunity is about leveling the playing field so that circumstances such as gender, ethnicity, place of birth, or family background do not influence a person s life chances. Success in life should depend on people s choices, effort and talents, not to their circumstances at birth. 'Measuring Inequality of Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean' introduces new methods for measuring inequality of opportunities and makes an assessment of its evolution in Latin America over a decade. An innovative Human Opportunity Index and other parametric and non-parametric techniques are presented for quantifying inequality based on circumstances exogenous to individual efforts. These methods are applied to gauge inequality of opportunities in access to basic services for children, learning achievement for youth, and income and consumption for adults.
This book is about how the distribution of income changes during the process of income development. Understanding development and the process of poverty reduction requires understanding not only how total income grows but also how its distribution behaves over time. The authors propose a decomposition of differences in entire distributions of household incomes, shedding new light on the powerful, and often conflicting, forces that underpin the changes in poverty and inequality that accompany the process of economic development. This approach is applied to three East Asian countries -- Indonesia, Malaysia, and China -- and to four in Latin America -- Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.
After decades of stagnation, the size of Latin America's middle class recently expanded to the point where, for the first time ever, the number of people in poverty is equal to the size of the middle class. This volume investigates the nature, determinants and possible consequences of this remarkable process of social transformation. We propose an original definition of the middle class, tailor-made for Latin America, centered on the concept of economic security and thus a low probability of falling into poverty. Given our definition of the middle class, there are four, not three, classes in Latin America. Sandwiched between the poor and the middle class there lies a large group of people wh...
Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs aim to reduce poverty by making welfare programs conditional upon the receivers' actions. That is, the government only transfers the money to persons who meet certain criteria. These criteria may include enrolling children into public schools, getting regular check-ups at the doctor's office, receiving vaccinations, or the like. They have been hailed as a way of reducing inequality and helping households break out of a vicious cycle whereby poverty is transmitted from one generation to another. Do these and other claims make sense? Are they supported by the available empirical evidence? This volume seeks to answer these and other related questions. Sp...
There are fewer people living in extreme poverty in the world today than 30 years ago. While that is an achievement, continuing progress for poor people is far from assured. Inequalities in access to key resources threaten to stall growth and poverty reduction in many places. The world's poorest have made only a small absolute gain over those 30 years. Progress has been slow against relative poverty as judged by the standards of the country and time one lives in, and a great many people in the world's emerging middle class remain vulnerable to falling back into poverty. The Economics of Poverty reviews critically past and present debates on poverty, spanning both rich and poor countries. The...
Social mobility is the hope of economic development and the mantra of a good society. There are disagreements about what constitutes social mobility, but there is broad agreement that people should have roughly equal chances of success regardless of their economic status at birth. Concerns about rising inequality have engendered a renewed interest in social mobility--especially in the developing world. However, efforts to construct the databases and meet the standards required for conventional analyses of social mobility are at a preliminary stage and need to be complemented by innovative, conceptual, and methodological advances. If forms of mobility have slowed in the West, then we might be...
Eight papers, both theoretical and applied, on the concept of equality of opportunity which says that a society should guarantee its members equal access to advantage regardless of their circumstances, while holding them responsible for turning that access into actual advantage by the application of effort.
An analysis of the elevated level of contemporary global economic inequality--its measurement, trends over time and geography, and the policy challenges thrown up by them, with a focus on mainly five countries--Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and Mexico.