In the first chapter, I explore whether features derived from high resolution satellite images of Sri Lanka are able to predict poverty or income at local areas. I extract from satellite imagery area specific indicators of economic well-being including the number of cars, type and extent of crops, length and type of roads, roof extent and roof type, building height and number of buildings. Estimated models are able to explain between 60 to 65 percent of the village-specific variation in poverty and average level of log income. The second chapter investigates the effects of preferential trade programs such as the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) on the direction of African countries’ exports. While these programs intend to promote African exports, textbook models of trade suggest that such asymmetric tariff reductions could divert African exports from other destinations to the tariff reducing economy. I examine the import patterns of 177 countries and estimate the diversion effect using a triple-difference estimation strategy, which exploits time variation in the product and country coverage of AGOA. I find no evidence of systematic trade diversion within Africa, but do find evidence of diversion from other industrialized destinations, particularly for apparel products. In the third chapter I apply three model selection methods – Lasso regularized regression, Bayesian Model Averaging, and Extreme Bound Analysis -- to candidate variables in a gravity models of trade. I use a panel dataset of of 198 countries covering the years 1970 to 2000, and find model selection methods suggest many fewer variables are robust that those suggested by the null hypothesis rejection methodology from ordinary least squares.

Student mobility is an issue for high poverty schools in the shadow of increased rigor and accountability for student performance. Whereas mobility is not a sole cause for poor achievement, it is a contributing factor for students in poverty who are already considered to be at risk of low achievement. Student mobility creates a hardship for schools and districts and hampers attempts to properly monitor the progress of students. This quantitative study examined the differences between mobile and nonmobile 4th grade students from 4 high poverty schools in a Northeast Tennessee school district. Research before and after the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) was explored. A two-way contingency analysis was used to determine if differences exist between mobile and nonmobile students on reading and math achievements tests. Additionally, the frequency of mobility and mobile and nonmobile among 3 ethnic groups were explored to determine the effects of mobility on achievement. The analyses suggested that no significant relationship exists between the independent variables. This quantitative study examined the differences between mobile and nonmobile fourth grade students from four high poverty schools in a Northeast Tennessee school district. Research before and after the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) was explored. A two way contingency analysis was used to determine if differences exist between mobile and nonmobile students on reading and math achievements tests. Additionally, the frequency of mobility and mobile and nonmobile among three ethnic groups were explored to determine the effects of mobility on achievement. The analyses suggested that no significant relationship exists between the independent variables.

The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine the relationship between student perceptions of classroom climate and student growth in high-poverty schools. More specifically, this study analyzed the relationship between Tripod Student Perception Survey classroom favorability ratings and Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) gain scores for students in grades 3 through 8 in a medium-sized school district in Northeast Tennessee during the 2012-2013 academic year. The data were gathered from approximately 1,500 fourth and fifth grade students from 6 elementary schools and 2 K-8 schools as well as approximately 1,300 sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students from 3 middle schools and 2 K-8 schools. The analysis of data found statistically significant relationships between student perceptions of caring and reading TVAAS gain scores among students in grades 4 and 5, student perceptions of conferring and math TVAAS gain scores among students in grades 4 and 5, as well as student perceptions of captivating and math TVAAS gain scores among students in grades 4 through 8. The study did not reveal statistically significant relationships between student perceptions of challenging, clarifying, consolidating, or controlling and reading or math TVAAS gain scores.

The study explored the perceptions of clinical therapists who have conducted treatment on adults who live in poverty with an anxiety related disorder. Previous studies have discussed the relationship between poverty and the development of anxiety related disorders, while others have discussed the negative impacts anxiety can have on physical health, mental health, and social functioning. To improve the efficacy of therapeutic intervention for low income adults with anxiety related disorders, the study explored what clinicians believe are the most effective aspects of therapy to utilize. The study elicited qualitative data, reflecting on the experiences of ten participants who had at least two years of clinical practice with low income adults who suffered from an anxiety disorder. The data was collected through face-to-face interviews, and analyzed the challenges and successes that therapists experienced in their clinical practice. The study found that clinicians viewed cognitive-behavioral approaches as the most effective treatment model when treating this population. The study also revealed that clinical practice experience was perceived to lead to higher rates of positive treatment outcomes. Based on the findings of the study, we recommend that that clinical social workers and agencies continue to utilize and adapt cognitive behavioral approaches when treating low-income adults who suffer from anxiety related disorders.

In the past two decades, Mesoamerican smallholder coffee farmers have had to confront several stressors and shocks, such as price crises and natural disasters, with debilitating impacts on the viability of their livelihoods. More recently, many farmers have suffered crop losses in the wake of the spread of coffee leaf rust disease, and researchers are predicting that some areas will become less suitable for coffee growing in the near future as a result of climate change. In response to these conditions and in the context of the withdrawal of the state from provision of agricultural services, development practitioners have mainly pursued a strategy of helping farmers gain access to specialty markets, including those purchasing coffee from farmers with organic and Fair Trade certifications. They have also promoted farmer organization into marketing cooperatives, which have in turn provided various services to their members, including credit and technical assistance. However, there are doubts as to whether these schemes are sufficient in increasing and stabilizing smallholder incomes, and some have predicted declining returns from these strategies in the future. For these reasons, many have called for the promotion of livelihood diversification as an additional component of rural development programs. This thesis studies both the shortfalls in coffee incomes compared to poverty lines and the current uses and perceptions of different diversification activities. In the first study, the shortfalls are calculated through construction of individual and average enterprise budgets based on grower records and interviews with four organic and organized growers and three conventional growers. It concludes that while some growers have coffee incomes approaching that poverty line, they are all currently below the line. There is wide variation within both groups. The second study uses content analysis of transcripts from 15 interviews with members of a regional coffee cooperative, Asociación Barillense de Agricultores (ASOBAGRI), based on four different interview guides. It concludes that coffee remains the primary livelihood strategy of the respondents, whereas most other activities offer relatively small contributions to incomes, with the exception of honey and a small sewing shop, and some reflect coping rather than risk management. The study also identified other themes mediating diversification, including income-smoothing, optimization, familiarity, social networks, and influences from external actors.

Thesis (M. Dev.)-- University of Limpopo, 2011. / Sustainability of poverty relief projects: an evaluative case study of Madumeleng community bread making project in Greater Letaba Municipality in Limpopo Province This mini-dissertation was conducted on a community poverty alleviation project that was implemented by government through the Department of Social Development at Madumeleng village. Madumeleng is a village in Bolobedu(Modjadji) under the Greater Letaba Municipality in Mopani District. The Greater Letaba Municipality is one of the rural municipalities in the district of Mopani. The project was identified by the community members as a flagship towards addressing poverty within the village and eventually in the municipal area. The project was initiated by a group of women who started as volunteers. Their objective was to make the project big and viable within the society. The women had wishes also that the project should eventually create more jobs for the community members and thereby contribute in alleviating poverty and unemployment. The above resonates well with the objective of government and in particular the Department of Social Development in funding these projects. The study was ignited by the fact that after all the efforts by government to provide funding and ensure that the project members are capacitated, still the project collapsed. The project could not last longer than it was expected and this was the main reason for the study. The study should contribute in surmounting some factors which might have contributed into the collapse of the project. Government should also be able to draw lessons from the study to improve on the approach when they fund future projects.

Magister Artium (Child and Family Studies) - MA(CFS) / Child-headed households (CHHs) are a recent development that has become progressively noticeable not only in South Africa but also internationally. This phenomenon arose as a result of the death of parents or abandonment of children by their primary caregivers. The Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) epidemic has taken away the lives particularly of many adults, leaving children orphaned and having to take on the adults’ responsibilities. In the past, relatives or the extended family would take the responsibility of caring and providing for orphaned children but, with current economic hardships, most families are unable to take the extra responsibility. As a result, older siblings become caregivers to their younger siblings. Unfortunately, when parents die, children often lose access to adequate food, social grants, education and health services. Despite the fact that it is the right of all South Africans, including children, to have access to sufficient food, many households, including CHHs, are living in poverty. As a result, they are vulnerable to food insecurity, leading to developmental, social and emotional challenges. The aim of the present study was to explore and describe the experiences, challenges and coping strategies of CHHs with food insecurity in Ingwavuma, from a bio-ecological perspective. Ingwavuma is a small rural town in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa. The study makes recommendations for social work projects, education and future research regarding CHHs’ experiences of food insecurity. This is a qualitative study that utilised an explorative-descriptive methodological approach. Purposive sampling was used to select 20 children between the ages of 13 and 18 years old from CHHs in Ingwavuma. One-on-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants at their homes in the town.

acase@tulane.edu / This dissertation includes three essays analyzing the socio-economic impacts of fiscal policies in the areas of educational attainment, interstate migration, inequality, and poverty. The first chapter, Labor versus Capital in the Provision of Public Services: Estimating the Marginal Products of Inputs in the Production of Student Outcomes, evaluates and compares the impact of various types of school expenditures on student test scores. It finds that additional operating expenditure has a positive short-term impact on students’ test scores (mainly through its impact on teachers’ compensation) while capital expenditures do no have any impact. The second chapter, Do Government Subsidies to Low-income Individuals Affect Interstate Migration? Evidence from the Massachusetts Health Care Reform, estimates the impact of MHCR on interstate migration of low income individuals to Massachusetts. It finds that providing health subsidy to low income individuals increases the population growth rate of low income individuals in border cities of Massachusetts with the other states and the effect diminishes quickly as distance to the state border increases. The third chapter, Fiscal Policy, Inequality, and Poverty in Iran: Assessing the Impact and Effectiveness of Taxes and Transfers, analyzes the fiscal system in Iran and its impact on inequality and poverty. It finds that the Targeted Subsidy Reform plays the major role in reducing inequality and poverty in Iran. / 1 / Ali Enami

In recent decades, there have been an increasingly large number of developing countries that have embraced external economic liberalisation policies. Following trade theory, trade liberalisation has the potential to increase employment elasticity of economic growth and hence, have a greater poverty reduction impact, compared to import-substitution or closed economies. However, critics of globalisation often emphasise that the benefits from growth may not be evenly spread; hence, the distributional impacts may have an adverse effect on the poor. Vietnam has undertaken major market-based reforms to transform itself into an outward-oriented economy. The resulting effects show that not only has Vietnam achieved significant growth, but it has also managed to satisfy all the Millennium Development Goals. However, a significant element of Vietnam’s reforms involves integrating the Vietnamese economy with world markets through trade liberalisation policies, which may affect the welfare and distributional impacts on Vietnamese households. This dissertation examines the impact of trade liberalisation on growth, poverty and inequality for Vietnam. It develops a macro-micro analytical framework whereby a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model is linked to a representative household model in order to capture these effects. The findings indicate that trade liberalisation will cause a significant increase in economic growth. The smallest gains occur under Vietnam’s unilateral trade liberalisation against ASEAN while the largest gains take place when Vietnam extends its liberalisation with the rest of the world. There will be a shift away from primary sectors towards industry-based sectors such as low-tech, intermediate manufacturing and durables. There is also substantial up-skilling of unskilled labour. Combined with the large real returns to capital goods, this will result in significant increases in both capital investments as well as in the accumulation of human capital. In addition, economic growth will induce a fall in poverty rates in Vietnam. Nonetheless, there will also be large increases in the inequality of income, especially in the rural sector. Hence, although growth has lifted a large proportion of households out of poverty, the distributional impacts have been detrimental to the most vulnerable households.

This thesis is primarily concerned with the meanings that are produced when women become visible amongst the homeless through photographic representations. While there have always been homeless women, unlike their male counterparts, they have remained largely invisible to the public and government policy makers.Social documentary photography has acted as one of the main avenues through which homeless women have, literally, been rendered visible. Driven by, and implicated in complex sociocultural and political circumstances, socially concerned photographs draw on the real and the fictional to generate truth/power effects.Thus, the thesis re/traces the representation of homeless women in a range of visual texts and ask how this construct has been discursively produced and deployed. In order to explore how socially concerned photography has contributed to, and made use of the idea of homeless, or destitute woman, examples are drawn from a range of photographic genres. These include traditional social documentary, public collections of photographs, photojournalism and publicity materials.The selected images, the circumstances out of which they emerge, and those in which they are read, are interrogated along, and with the consideration of the interconnections between axes of gender, genre, race, class and power. The inquiry does not aim to establish a unitary source, or coherent trajectory of the visual representation of the homeless woman, because origins, particularly of ideas, are always contestable. Rather, a primary aim is to expand the field of possibilities for the visual portrayal of women's experiences of homelessness. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)