Poverty forecast

There is 'tremendous potential' for reducing global poverty in the immediate future, according to researchers at the Brookings Institution in Washington. But they also warn there is no magic ingredient for success, and that progress depends on a 'complex recipe' including better targeting of those in poverty.

Tax and benefit changes announced by the Chancellor in his 2012 Autumn Statement will mean an extra 200,000 children living in poverty by 2017-18, according to a new analysis from the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank.

The Autumn Statement announced several important changes to the tax and benefit system from April 2013 – including a higher personal tax allowance and a 1 per cent cap, for three years, on the annual uprating of most working-age benefits and tax credits.

The effectiveness of anti-poverty strategies depends heavily on boosting employment, argues a new policy paper. Policies that focus on income redistribution are not enough by themselves.

The paper is published jointly by the Centre for Labour and Social Studies and the Child Poverty Action Group. It examines why, 70 years after the Beveridge report, poverty in the UK continues to be so prevalent, and what a renewed attack on want might look like.  

Global poverty is increasingly becoming a matter of domestic inequality, according to a new study. This is because most of the world population living in poverty (by income and multi-dimensional poverty measures) now live in countries categorised by the World Bank as middle-income countries (MICs) rather than low-income countries (LICs).