The UNICEF 75 report, Preventing a lost decade: Urgent action to reverse the devastating...
Poverty measurement
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04/04/2011
Redefining poverty?
by Stewart Lansley
The government has been aiming to shift the debate on poverty from relative poverty to life chances. So is it aiming to downgrade the goal of abolishing financial poverty?
In March 1999, Tony Blair surprised an audience of academics and policy advisers with an unexpected commitment – to halve child poverty within a decade and 'eradicate' it within 20 years. It was as unexpected as it was bold and raised a few eyebrows among those present. Few experts believed, given the scale of the task, that it would be possible to meet the targets in the timetable laid out. Between 1979 and 1997, the level of child poverty (measured in relative terms) had doubled. When Labour won a landslide victory in 1997, just over a quarter of children – 3.4 million – were estimated to be living in poverty.
Category: Articles -
20/01/2011
Free market think tank proposes new poverty measures
Measures of poverty should be decoupled from average earnings, argues Kristian Niemietz in a new monograph, A New Understanding of Poverty, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). Niemietz argues that one perverse result of such relative poverty measures among many is that poverty often declines in a serious recession when the better paid lose their jobs. The author proposes an entirely new way of measuring poverty and argues that if this measure were applied, public policy would orientate itself towards creating the conditions that allowed the poor to become better off. The book can be purchased from the IEA.
See also:
The review of A New Understanding of Poverty by Stewart Lansley and Joanna Mack.Category: Reports -
03/12/2010
The Field Review
The Foundation Years: Preventing Poor Children Becoming Poor Adults, the final report of the UK Government Independent Review on Poverty and Life Chances headed by Labour MP Frank Field, argues for an expansion of provision for children in their early years and a downgrading of efforts to reduce income poverty.
BackgroundIn June 2010, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, commissioned Frank Field MP to conduct an Independent Review on Poverty and Life Chances.
The aim of the Review was to:
Category: Reports -
29/11/2010
UK poverty set to rise in next three years
Child and working-age poverty in the UK is set to rise in the next three years, according to projections from the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies in Child and Working-Age Poverty from 2010 to 2013.
Category: Reports
