Multi-Scale Features of Regional Poverty and the Impact of Geographic Capital: A Case Study of Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in Jilin Province, China

Poverty is a challenge worldwide. Policy and regulations guiding anti-poverty measures for governments, NGOs, and multilateral institutions have not considered the spatial scale effect of regional poverty, resulting in low-efficiency poverty alleviation actions. This study addressed research gaps by analyzing the multi-scale (county, township, and village) features of regional poverty in Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in Jilin province, China. It examined the impact of geographic capital and associated spatial heterogeneity from four dimensions: natural environment, transport location, facilities accessibility, and socioeconomic development. The results identified that regional poverty varied at different scales: lower-scale poverty had higher levels of spatial differences, agglomeration, and spatial autocorrelation than higher-scale poverty, and the “island effect” was prominent. The factors potentially impacting regional poverty varied at different scales for geographical capital. At the township scale, only transport location and socioeconomic development dimensions could make significant differences. Factors in all four dimensions could affect village-scale poverty significantly, and the natural environment dimension was more effective than the other three dimensions. The impact of geographic capital and its spatial heterogeneity at the village scale varied, implying that local and diverse anti-poverty measures should increase. This study improves understanding of the multi-scale features of regional poverty and supports the formulation of effective anti-poverty measures.

Will Plans to Ease Energy Poverty Go Up in Smoke? Assessing the Hungarian NECP through the Lens of Solid Fuel Users’ Vulnerabilities

Hungary has one of the highest incidences of energy poverty in the European Union, and a high share of Hungarian low-income households rely on solid fuels. This paper first maps the energy vulnerabilities of Hungarian solid fuel users using six energy vulnerability factors. The mapping underlines that solid fuel users are more exposed to energy vulnerability than average households. This is followed by an analysis of energy-poverty-related objectives and measures outlined in the Hungarian National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP), a key policy document of the green energy transition. The paper outlines that the NECP fails to comply with the requirement of setting energy poverty alleviation objectives. Furthermore, the outlined energy-poverty-related policies and measures fail to provide systematic solutions to energy-poverty drivers, especially those solid fuel users’ vulnerabilities. Hungary’s general antiegalitarian policy environment and the weak design of energy poverty measures in the NECP suggest severe deficiency regarding a just energy transition guarantee. A just energy transition in Hungary is therefore endangered by the fact that EU energy poverty alleviation requirements fall under soft-law coordination mechanisms that make such requirements hardly enforceable in a member state with an antipoor policy bias that is reluctant to tackle energy poverty.

Monetary and Non-Monetary Poverty within Urban Locals and Rural Migrants in China using Inequality-Sensitive Poverty Measures

This paper measures monetary and non-monetary poverty among urban local and rural migrant groups in the urban labour market in China, capturing incidence, intensity and inequality of poverty. To measure non-monetary poverty in multiple dimensions the chosen indicators are education, health status, health insurance and pension insurance. Using data from the China Household Income Project for the years 2002, 2007, and 2013, it appears that although monetary poverty in both groups is low, migrants have higher levels of non-monetary deprivation for various levels of poverty thresholds. Compared to the urban locals, the rural migrants experienced relatively less severe poverty than mild or moderate poverty during 2002 and 2007. Our Shapley decomposition exercise on non-monetary poverty measure reveals that the incidence contributes most to the urban-migrant gap, and the contribution of intensity is higher than that of inequality. The most important factors in multidimensional poverty for both groups are health insurance and pension insurance in all years. Our logit analysis shows that the effects of demographic characteristics, level of contract, occupation, and the industry have different impacts on these two groups.

Economic Growth, Income Inequality and Poverty Trends in Pasture Area’s Householder in SujanagarUpazila, Pabna, Bangladesh: Implications for Development strategy

The study is based on primary household level data obtained from a survey on income expenditure and poverty measures for 2020-21. The perceptual data were collected through field survey which was based on semi structural questionnaire. Total 162 selected samples were considered and simple random sampling techniques have been adopted during data collection. These factual data were collected from various secondary sources like books, journals, magazines, nationally and internationally published data etc. Human development indicators for 1996 have been compared with the study area (pasture area in SujanagarUpazila, Pabna district, Bangladesh). The empirical result shows the analysis of poverty, income inequality, economic growth & development scenario of pasture area’s in Sujanagarupazila, Pabna district, Bangladesh. The research found that 55% respondents live under the poverty line. The study also examines that these householders play an important contribution to the national GDP but their living level is below than standard one. If these areas’ householders’ development access were more available, they would return a great introduction to the society. This paper advises using anti-poverty policy, the concept of poverty minimizing inequality that the society should be tolerant ofattaining the goal of minimizing poverty. It is useful to differentiate between structural and transient causes of poverty. The provision of public goods plays an imperative role in fighting poverty. The government’s proper planning and initiatives, NGOs and Community based organization’s collaboration help build the study area as a socio-economic and environmentally friendly area in Bangladesh.

The Heavy Burden of “Dependent Children”: An Italian Story

This paper analyses multidimensional fuzzy monetary and non-monetary deprivation in households with children by using two different definitions: households with children under 14 years old, and the EU definition of households with dependent children. Eight dimensions of non-monetary deprivation were found using 34 items from the EU-SILC 2016 survey. Dealing with subpopulations, it is essential to compute standard errors for the presented estimators. Thus, a relevant added value of the paper is fuzzy poverty measures and associated standard errors, which were also computed. Moreover, a comparison was made between the measures obtained concerning the two subpopulations across countries. With a focus on Italy, an Italian macro-region is presented.

Economic Growth, Income Inequality and Poverty Trends in Pasture Area’s Householder in Sujanagar Upazila, Pabna, Bangladesh: Implications for Development strategy

The study is based on primary household level data obtained from a survey on income expenditure and poverty measures for 2020-21. The perceptual data were collected through field survey which was based on semi structural questionnaire. Total 162 selected samples were considered and simple random sampling techniques have been adopted during data collection. These factual data were collected from various secondary sources like books, journals, magazines, nationally and internationally published data etc. Human development indicators for 1996 have been compared with the study area (pasture area in SujanagarUpazila, Pabna district, Bangladesh). The empirical result shows the analysis of poverty, income inequality, economic growth & development scenario of pasture area’s in Sujanagarupazila, Pabna district, Bangladesh. The research found that 55% respondents live under the poverty line. The study also examines that these householders play an important contribution to the national GDP but their living level is below than standard one. If these areas’ householders’ development access were more available, they would return a great introduction to the society. This paper advises using anti-poverty policy, the concept of poverty minimizing inequality that the society should be tolerant ofattaining the goal of minimizing poverty. It is useful to differentiate between structural and transient causes of poverty. The provision of public goods plays an imperative role in fighting poverty. The government’s proper planning and initiatives, NGOs and Community based organization’s collaboration help build the study area as a socio-economic and environmentally friendly area in Bangladesh.

Beyond multidimensional poverty: challenges of measurement and its link with social policy in Mexico

PurposeComprehensive poverty measures are increasingly gaining importance since people's deprivations and needs cover aspects beyond income. For this reason, the goal of this article is to propose a methodology to measure poverty that includes objective social deprivation, income deprivation and subjective social deprivation, using Mexico City and its municipalities as the study context. In order to show areas of intervention of public policies, the authors discuss the dimensions and indicators used in the multidimensional measurement.Design/methodology/approachUsing the Social Welfare Survey (N = 2,871), the authors measure poverty with the Alkire-Foster methodology. The applied concept of poverty includes objective and subjective deprivations, and income.FindingsThe interaction between objective and subjective deprivations shows that income, social cohesion, built environment and public insecurity are important areas for the redesigning of public policies.Originality/valueThe employed method to measure poverty emphasizes the relevance of including subjective deprivations in interaction with objective deprivations and income. It evidences the need for the implementation or strengthening of public policies.

Children and Multidimensional Poverty: Four Measurement Strategies

Empirically, official multidimensional measures of poverty often show children to be the poorest age group. Such poverty measures and their analysis can be used to directly inform policies to reduce children’s multiple deprivations. This paper introduces methods to produce official national statistics on multidimensional poverty that inform child-focused anti-poverty policies. In doing so, it recognises the importance of parsimonious, consistent measures, given practical constraints such as policy makers’ time. The paper does not recommend constructing several disjoint poverty measures which cannot be straightforwardly interpreted and used alongside one another, as these may create confusion or dilute policy attention. To create a compact and high-information measurement platform, the paper introduces four measurement strategies that have been used to directly uncover policy-relevant data on children’s experience of multidimensional poverty, and that are consistent with official population-level statistics. The four are as follows: (1) Include children’s deprivations as indicators of multidimensional poverty in national measures. (2) Disaggregate multidimensional poverty indices and their associated information platform to compare children and adults. (3) Analyse individual child deprivations and explore gendered and intra-household inequalities. (4) Construct an individual measure of child multidimensional poverty that is directly linked to the official national measure, but contains additional indicators across the life course of children. The paper illustrates these four strategies and the child-relevant statistics they yield, using examples from official poverty measures and previous research. It discusses the strengths and challenges of each method from conceptual, policy, and technical perspectives, and examines how they can be used for descriptive and prescriptive purposes in line with the Sustainable Development Goals.