Persistence underdevelopment as reflected in different kinds of absolute poverty in the global south has instigated scholarly and policy debate on poverty measurement and poverty reduction. In terms of measuring poverty, different empirical investigations, relying on different theoretical traditions, have produced different ratios of poverty. However, not a single study has investigated the public perceptions of these official definitions and estimates of poverty. What do the members of public think about the official poverty measures and their associated poverty estimates? Regarding poverty reduction, one section of the existing literature has narrowly examined the effect of economic globalisation, on a single measure of poverty, without providing due attention to the effect of social security, on all kinds of poverty. Another section of the literature, which examines the relationship between social security and a single measure of poverty, has implicitly overlooked the influence of globalisation on all types of poverty. However, so far, no empirical study has examined the relative strength and interaction of economic globalisation and social security in reducing all kinds of poverty. This dissertation investigated three pressing questions in the area of poverty measurement and reduction. First, it explored the authenticity of existing official poverty estimates and their ability to characterise the true essence of poverty. Second, it examined the relationships between social security and poverty, and economic globalisation and poverty simultaneously in order to identify their relative strength in reducing poverty. Third, it examined the association of the interaction of social security and globalisation with the four poverty estimates: national, $1.25 per capita a day, multidimensional and $2 per capita a day. This research relies on the emerging pragmatic philosophical paradigm, and inductive- deductive mixed-methods research strategy. By extending the current literature on poverty measurement and poverty reduction, this study makes several methodological, theoretical and empirical - contributions. First, it argues that by not counting the vulnerable as poor, the existing poverty measures seriously undermine the essence of poverty and thereby understate the extent of poverty.

Foreign aid has been used on the one hand by donors as an important international relations policy tool and on the other hand by developing countries as a source of funds for development. Since its inception in the 1940s, foreign aid has been one of the most researched topics in development economics. This study adds to this growing aid effectiveness literature, with a particular focus on the under-researched relationship between foreign aid and extreme poverty. The main empirical assessment is based on a sample of 120 developing countries from 1981 to 2013. The study had two main objectives, namely: (i) to estimate the impact of foreign aid on poverty reduction and (ii) to examine the direction of causality between foreign aid and poverty in developing countries. From these two broad objectives, there are six specific objectives, which include to: (i) examine the overall impact of foreign aid (total official development assistance) on extreme poverty, (ii) investigate the impact of different proxies of foreign aid on the three proxies of extreme poverty, (iii) assess whether political freedom (democracy) or economic freedom enhances the effectiveness of foreign aid, (iv) compare the impact of foreign aid on extreme poverty by developing country income groups, and (v) examine the direction of causality between extreme poverty and foreign aid. To achieve these objectives, the study employed two main dynamic panel data econometric estimation methods, namely the systemgeneralised method of moments (SGMM) technique and the panel vector error correction model (VECM) Granger causality framework. While the SGMM was used to assess the impact of foreign aid on extreme poverty, the panel VECM Granger causality was used to examine the direction of causality between foreign aid poverty. The SGMM was used because of its ability to deal with endogeneity by controlling for simultaneity and unobserved heterogeneity, whereas the panel VECM was preferred because the variables were stationary and cointegrated. / Economics / D. Phil. (Economics)