Poor Children in Rich Households and Vice Versa: A Blurred Picture or Hidden Realities?

An expanding evidence base suggests that children experiencing monetary and multidimensional poverty are not the same. This article breaks new ground by providing a unique mixed methods investigation of drivers of child poverty mismatch in Ethiopia and Vietnam, considering the role of measurement error and individualistic and structural factors. The analysis capitalises on large-scale secondary quantitative panel data and combines this with purposively collected primary qualitative data in both countries. It finds that factors at the household and structural level can mediate the effects of monetary poverty in terms of multidimensional poverty and vice versa, but that the size and sign of these effects are specific to place and time. The policy mix aiming to reduce all forms of child poverty need to be targeted on the basis of a multidimensional assessment of poverty and reflect the complex and contextspecific interactions between determinants of child poverty

Social Spending and Aggregate Welfare in Developing and Transition Economies

Notwithstanding the unprecedented attention devoted to reducing poverty and fostering human development via scaling up social sector spending, there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical work on the question of whether social spending is effective in achieving these goals. This paper examines the impact of government spending on the social sectors (health, education, and social protection) on two major indicators of aggregate welfare (the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index and child mortality), using a panel dataset comprising 55 developing and transition countries from 1990 to 2009. We find that government social spending has a significantly positive causal effect on the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index, while government expenditure on health has a significant negative impact on child mortality rate. These results are fairly robust to the method of estimation, the use of alternative instruments to control for the endogeneity of social spending, the set of control variables included in the regressions, and the use of alternative samples

Dynamics and Drivers of Consumption and Multidimensional Poverty: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

This study aims to explore poverty measures, its dynamics and determinants using Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and consumption poverty. Our results show that the two measures assign similar poverty status to about 52 percent of households and that both approaches confirm poverty is mainly transient in rural Ethiopia. However, we find that the trend in adjusted head count poverty is different when using these two poverty measures. In terms of determinants of poverty dynamics, we find that household size matters in consumption poverty while we do not find significant effects on multidimensional poverty. Amongst the shocks, drought shock is found to affect consumption poverty but not multidimensional poverty. This implies that short-term shocks are more reflected in consumption poverty while the effect of simultaneous shocks is exhibited significantly on multidimensional poverty. Overall, our result provides empirical evidence on the importance of using both measures as complementary to get a full picture of poverty measure, dynamics and determinants

Middle East - North Africa and the millennium development goals : implications for German development cooperation

          Closed-loop controlled combustion is a promising technique to improve the overall performance of internal combustion engines and Diesel engines in particular. In order for this technique to be implemented some form of feedback from the combustion process is required. The feedback signal is processed and from it combustionrelated parameters are computed. These parameters are then fed to a control process which drives a series of outputs (e.g. injection timing in Diesel engines) to control their values. This paper’s focus lies on the processing and computation that is needed on the feedback signal before this is ready to be fed to the control process as well as on the electronics necessary to support it. A number of feedback alternatives are briefly discussed and for one of them, the in-cylinder pressure sensor, the CA50 (crank angle in which the integrated heat release curve reaches its 50% value) and the IMEP (Indicated Mean Effective Pressure) are identified as two potential control variables. The hardware architecture of a system capable of calculating both of them on-line is proposed and necessary feasibility size and speed considerations are made by implementing critical blocks in VHDL targeting a flash-based Actel ProASIC3 automotive-grade FPGA

Food system development pathways for healthy, nature-positive and inclusive food systems

Sustainable food systems require the integration of and alignment between recommendations for food and land use practices, as well as an understanding of the political economy context and identification of entry points for change. We propose a food systems transformation framework that takes these elements into account and links long-term goals with short-term measures and policies, ultimately guiding the decomposition of transformation pathways into concrete steps. Taking the transition to healthier and more sustainable diets as an example, we underscore the centrality of social inclusion to the food systems transformation debate

Measuring Multidimensional Poverty in India: A New Proposal

This paper focuses on the methodology by which India’s 2002 Below the Poverty Line (BPL) census data identify the poor and construct a BPL headcount. Using the BPL 2002 methodology and NFHS (National Family Health Survey) data, it identifies which rural families would have been considered BPL were NFHS (National Family Health Survey) data used. It compares these to poor families that would be identified using the same variables with the Alkire Foster multidimensional poverty methodology. It finds that up to 12 per cent of the poor sample population and 33 per cent of the extreme poor could be misclassified as non-poor by the pseudo-BPL method. The paper also develops a sample Index of Deprivation that responds to criticisms regarding BPL data. We compare these results with income poverty and with pseudo-BPL status for sample respondents and disaggregate the index by state and break it down by dimension

Does it Matter that we do not Agree on the Definition of Poverty? A Comparison of Four Approaches

While there is world-wide agreement on poverty reduction as an overriding goal of development policy, there is little agreement on the definition of poverty. Four approaches to the definition and measurement of poverty are reviewed in this paper: the monetary, capability, social exclusion and participatory approaches. The theoretical underpinnings of the various measures and problems of operationalizing them are pointed out. It is argued that each is a construction of reality, involving numerous judgements, which are often not transparent. The different methods have different implications for policy, and also, to the extent that they point to different people as being poor, for targeting. Empirical work in Peru and India shows that there is significant lack of overlap between the methods with, for example, nearly half the population identified as in poverty according to monetary poverty but not in capability poverty, and conversely. This confirms similar findings elsewhere. Hence, the definition of poverty does matter for poverty eradication strategies.