As a marker of current austerity policies, the growth of the emergency food aid landscape has become recognisable through the ‘food bank’. These places of charitable food-redistribution have seen their presence increase within an evolving social policy context. Understanding food bank use as two modes of ‘experience’, this thesis has mapped both the quantitative geographical ‘experience’ of the food bank, alongside the qualitative ‘experience’ gained from understanding why people have turned to them for help. Attending to the quantitative rise of the food bank as a means of support, this thesis has recognised that there has been substantial changes within the recent socio-political landscape of the UK that have stimulated food bank growth as an inadequate response to rising levels of poverty. In approaching the knowledge construction of the geospatial distribution of food banks across Wales, this thesis provides clarity to the organisational structures of both; the Trussell Trust Foodbank Network, and independent food banks. As a social policy, the Welfare Reform Act (2012) has been concluded within this thesis as holding the bonds of responsibility for driving the quantitative rise in food bank numbers across Wales. Recognition of increased ‘need’ triggered the opening of food banks as a way of providing emergency relief where social security failed. This thesis has mapped the growth of food banks in Wales and has recognised further growth as being attended to the rise in neoliberal policies of recent governments (1998-2015). Employing several data collection methods, the qualitative experience of food poverty has been illuminated through semi-structured thematic interviews and focus group interviews conducted with service providers detailing how the changing landscape of social security, and the ways in which the rise in attitudes of individualism have changed the acceptability of social security. Analysed within a Constructivist Grounded Theory approach, the key conceptual themes within this thesis centre upon the rise of a deserving and undeserving attitude within poverty, and how this resides within a neoliberal attitude of structure and agency driven poverty. Service provider interviews have been augmented by biographical focused semistructured interviews with service users, detailing their experience of having to resort to food bank use as their only means of sustenance. Here service users identified with a deserving and undeserving narrative, identifying with the structural and agency driven poverty as a cause of food bank use. Applying this approach, service users placed a hierarchical attitude to food bank use and furthered this distinction between the deserving and the undeserving user.

Against the background of Nigeria’s substantial rise in oil income, under three distinct chapters, this thesis analysed poverty mobility, inequality, and developments in oil industry. Given that the rate of progress against poverty is considered to be an increasing function of growth (Ravallion and Chen, 1997; Ravallion, 2001; Dollar and Kraay, 2002, 2016); and based on documented evidence on the negative effect of oil intensity on growth, it is hypothesized that: (a) ‘resource-curse’ makes it harder to grow the economy (e.g Gelb (1988) and associates, Sachs and Warner (1995, 1997, 2001), Auty (2001); Gylfason (2011; 2001), and Sala-i-Martin and Subranmanian (2013)); (b) inequality is growth-impeding and also make it harder for the growth that occurs to help poor people (Ravallion, 2007). Therefore, the presence of ‘resource-curse’ and the high level of inequality in Nigeria could explain the country’s inability to address its rising poverty incidence, given its enournous oil wealth. In other words growth drives poverty reduction. Growth is crowded-out by ‘resource-curse’ (or oil intensity). Therefore oil intensity harms poverty reduction. To provide the contexts for these hypotheses, we open the thesis by clearly laying out, in Chapters 1 and 2, the groundwork for the analyses that follow: respectively, general introduction, and review of relevant literature. We analyse the evolution of welfare of households according to the demographics of the household heads in Chapter 3. In Chapters 4, 5 and 6, we asked the following questions and try to address the questions using original survey data on Nigeria and aggregate-level data on oil-related variables. What is the current extent of poverty and inequality in Nigeria? How have these evolved through the years? Is there micro-based evidence of the ‘curse-effect’ of oil on the average living standards of households in the country? Since a static poverty profile understates the extent of poverty, in Chapter 3, we construct and used a synthetic panel to measure poverty dynamics (i.e. the rates of poverty transitions, movement in and out of poverty or individual poverty experiences through time) in the country. In addition, we model the determinants of poverty dynamics using Censored Least Absolute Deviation (CLAD) estimator. The chapter produces evidence that there were more transitions [into] than exits from poverty over 1980-2010; and, as a result, absolute poverty incidence has risen by nearly four-fold over the period. We also find evidence that much of the observed poverty in Nigeria is chronic than transient and the determinants of transient and chronic poverty are not congruent. For instance, the dummy coefficient for households living in oil producing states indicate stronger impact on transient than chronic poverty. Finally, drawing on six sweeps of household surveys of Nigeria that together span 1980–2010 with a pooled sample size of about 97,000 households and data on Nigeria’s age-gender-specific life expectancy from the World Health Organization, this paper shows that about 72 percent to 91 percent of Nigeria’s poor are at risk of spending their entire life below the poverty line. To show this, I estimate the duration of poverty spells and link this to the average age of the poor and to the life expectancy. I find that the poor are expected to escape poverty at the age of 85.46 years on average. However, there is heterogeneity in the exit time, with the transient poor averaging 3–7 years below the poverty line and the chronically poor averaging 37 years or more. Given these exit times and life expectancy, the mean age of the poor at their expected time of escaping poverty exceeds the average life expectancy, meaning some of the poor are not guaranteed to escape poverty in their remaining lifetime. The implication is that growth in Nigeria has not been sufficient nor has it demonstrated the potential to help the poor break free from poverty. However, like Brazil, Nigeria can significantly reduce poverty without absolute reliance on economic growth by reducing its high inflation rate and substantially expanding its social security and social assistance transfers. In Chapter 5, using household surveys of Nigeria, we link and analyse the evolution of poverty in Nigeria to the response of poverty to growth. In particular, we test two hypotheses [put forward by earlier studies]: (i) "Growth is still good for the poor" - (Dollar, Kleineberg, & Kraay, 2016); (ii)" Inequality is bad for the poor" - (Ravallion and Chan, 2007). In a two-fold aim, we estimate the various measures of distribution in order to see how inequality has evolved over 1980-2010 on one hand, and link this evolution to the response of poverty to growth, on the other. Based on the findings, our measures of distribution are all in agreement that Nigeria is less unequal in 2010 than it was in 1980. This decline in inequality, we found, was partly driven by contractions in average living standards, 'pro-poor' growth during 1996-2004 and redistribution of welfare among the non-poor rather than, as expected, redistribution between the non-poor and the poor. Also, we found that the changing pattern of inequality has mitigated the impact of contraction on the poor and in another period, countervailed the gains of growth that should have accrued to the poor. We investigate in Chapter 6, at a micro-level, the hypothesis that the abundance of natural resources (e.g. oil) exerts a depressing effect on growth. Instead of growth in GDP per capita, growth in PCE was used as the LHS variable in the growth regression. Because the surveys in Nigeria are not panel, we follow Deaton (1985) to construct a pseudo panel for the above exercise. This chapter did not find – as far as our leading measures of oil intensity are concerned – negative effects of changes in oil intensity on changes in household consumption. However, growth in the country’s oil revenue is found to be growth-impeding in household consumption. For instance, based on our POLS (FE) results, a 1% rise in real oil revenue is associated with decline in per capita expenditure of households by 0.35%. The impact of the variable that measures oil output (in barrels) per person per day, is negative both for POLS and FE estimations and significant at 1% levels. This result has two implications. First, the country’s population size has been growing at a rate faster than the output from oil, i.e the country’s major source of revenue. More clearly, the more Nigerians there are, for every barrel of crude produced per day, the slower the growth in household welfare. Precisely, if the number of citizens for every barrel of crude produced per day grows by 100%, household welfare will decline by 52%. We provide general policy conclusion in Chapter 7.

Public policy has important implications for the lives of the poor. This dissertation analyzes how three types of policy impact the poor in developing countries. First, tax and transfer systems can benefit many poor while still making some poor worse off, and this phenomenon is overlooked by measures currently used to assess transfers in tandem with the taxes used to pay for them. I show that comparisons of poverty before and after taxes and transfers, as well as measures of horizontal equity and progressivity---which are often used to analyze anti-poverty policies in tandem with the taxes used to pay for them---can fail to capture an important aspect: that a substantial proportion of the poor are made poorer (or non-poor made poor) by the tax and transfer system. I call this fiscal impoverishment, and axiomatically derive a measure of its extent. Second, the government's choice of how to measure poverty---specifically, the choice between a unidimensional (usually income or consumption-based) measure and a multidimensional measure that incorporates other dimensions such as health and education---can affect the strategic interactions between government ministers, leading to changes in the amount of resources spent to alleviate poverty. In a game-theoretic framework, I show that despite introducing free riding, a multidimensional measure usually leads to an increase in total antipoverty spending; antipoverty expenditures can be further increased by publishing partial dimensional indices alongside the scalar multidimensional one. Third, efforts to digitize government transfer programs through savings accounts and debit cards can enable the poor to build trust in financial institutions and save more. I study a natural experiment in which debit cards were rolled out to beneficiaries of a Mexican conditional cash transfer program, who were already receiving their transfers in savings accounts through a government bank. Using a rich combination of administrative and survey data, I find beneficiaries initially used their cards to check their balances and build trust in the bank, after which they used the account to save. Formal and overall savings increased, and this effect was higher for women with low baseline bargaining power who may have the most difficulty saving at home. / Sean Higgins

A highly debated topic of the last few decades has centred on the idea of communication as a means for poverty reduction. With two-thirds of the world's population living in poverty, there is a dire need to understand why global poverty and inequality continue to increase, and what role communication can, and is playing in the fight against poverty. This study therefore seeks to understand how three aid and development agencies in New Zealand, New Zealand Aid (NZAID), Oxfam New Zealand (NZ), and Christian World Service (CWS), construct poverty in the context of international development. Additionally it seeks to establish how these three organisations view relationships between communication and poverty. Eleven semi-structured, in-depth interviews with key informants were conducted, transcribed, and analysed in order to extract information surrounding the issues of poverty and international development. From this analysis, it is evident that these three organisations recognise official and unofficial definitions of poverty. It is also apparent that these definitions of poverty affect the ways in which these organisations view the causes of poverty, as well as their outlook on international development. Furthermore, three topics emerged when examining relationships between communication and poverty: communication with local people and local organisations, communication about local people and local organisations, and dealing with communication issues through accountability, transparency, and legitimacy. Implications on communication and development theory as well as theory on the discursive constructions of poverty are addressed. Finally, this study addresses practical implications for aid and development agency practice, and offers recommendations for further study in the area development communication.

This thesis investigates income inequality and poverty in urban China using survey data from 2002. It shows that in urban China, income in the coastal region is less equally distributed than in the interior region, although social welfare is higher. Developed cities have more inequality than less developed cities, but they also have a higher level of social welfare. Further decomposition analysis indicates that intragroup inequality accounts for the dominant part of overall inequality no matter how groups are categorized - by region, by city level, by gender, or by education. There is a significant difference in the incidence of poverty between interior regions and coastal regions, with the interior region having a higher headcount ratio and a greater poverty gap ratio. It is also found that developed cities have lower poverty than less developed cities.

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Economics, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Kentucky, 2006. / Title from document title page (viewed on January 23, 2007). Document formatted into pages; contains: ix, 157 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-153).

This thesis consists of three empirical chapters related to distributional outcomes, such as poverty and inequality, in three different contexts. Chapter 1 outlines a class of statistical procedures that permit testing of a broad range of multidimensional stochastic dominance hypotheses. We apply the procedures to data on income and leisure hours for individuals in Germany, the UK, and the USA. We find that no country first-order stochastically dominates the others in both dimensions for all years of comparison. Furthermore, while in general the USA stochastically dominates Germany and the UK with respect to income, in most periods Germany stochastically dominates with respect to leisure hours. Finally, we find evidence that bivariate poverty is lower in Germany than in either the UK or the USA. On the other hand, poverty comparisons between the UK and the USA are sensitive to the subpopulation of individuals considered. Chapter 2 provides a detailed description of the evolution of income inequality in Vietnam between 1993 and 2006. We construct consistent estimates of annual household income using five nationally representative household surveys. Our main finding is that Vietnam’s rapid growth was accompanied by a reduction in inequality between 1993 and 2002 and an unchanged level of inequality between 2002 and 2006. We find that strong growth in employment income and robust growth of cropping income played an important role in decreasing rural inequality, while the growth of wage income and the stagnation of household business income similarly contributed to the reduction in urban inequality. Chapter 3 examines the impacts of the 2001 U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement on provincial poverty level in Vietnam. My main finding is that provinces that were more exposed to the U.S. tariff cuts experienced faster decreases in poverty between 2002 and 2004. I subsequently explore three labour market channels from the trade agreement to poverty alleviation. Provinces that were more exposed to the tariff cuts experienced (1) increases in provincial wage premiums for low-skilled workers, (2) faster movement into wage and salaried jobs for low-skilled workers, and (3) more rapid job growth in formal enterprises.

This thesis consists of three empirical chapters related to distributional outcomes, such as poverty and inequality, in three different contexts. Chapter 1 outlines a class of statistical procedures that permit testing of a broad range of multidimensional stochastic dominance hypotheses. We apply the procedures to data on income and leisure hours for individuals in Germany, the UK, and the USA. We find that no country first-order stochastically dominates the others in both dimensions for all years of comparison. Furthermore, while in general the USA stochastically dominates Germany and the UK with respect to income, in most periods Germany stochastically dominates with respect to leisure hours. Finally, we find evidence that bivariate poverty is lower in Germany than in either the UK or the USA. On the other hand, poverty comparisons between the UK and the USA are sensitive to the subpopulation of individuals considered. Chapter 2 provides a detailed description of the evolution of income inequality in Vietnam between 1993 and 2006. We construct consistent estimates of annual household income using five nationally representative household surveys. Our main finding is that Vietnam’s rapid growth was accompanied by a reduction in inequality between 1993 and 2002 and an unchanged level of inequality between 2002 and 2006. We find that strong growth in employment income and robust growth of cropping income played an important role in decreasing rural inequality, while the growth of wage income and the stagnation of household business income similarly contributed to the reduction in urban inequality. Chapter 3 examines the impacts of the 2001 U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement on provincial poverty level in Vietnam. My main finding is that provinces that were more exposed to the U.S. tariff cuts experienced faster decreases in poverty between 2002 and 2004. I subsequently explore three labour market channels from the trade agreement to poverty alleviation. Provinces that were more exposed to the tariff cuts experienced (1) increases in provincial wage premiums for low-skilled workers, (2) faster movement into wage and salaried jobs for low-skilled workers, and (3) more rapid job growth in formal enterprises.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-103).