Suchergebnisse

What is poverty? Is it do to with what we have compared to others around us, or is it to do with what we need to survive? This book looks at the causes and effects of extreme poverty - defined as having less than US1.90 a day to live on - and discusses how poverty is also a serious issue in the developed or industrialised world. It looks at what is what is being done to tackle extreme poverty and asks readers to think about what they can do to help those facing poverty, for example by donating to a local food bank. Age 9+

Child poverty is an epidemic in most developing countries, and also exists in developed countries, including Australia. In many developed countries the official definition of poverty used for statistical purposes is based on relative income. More than 30% of children in developing countries about 600 million live on less than US $1 a day. Every 3.6 seconds one person dies of starvation, usually it is a child under the age of 5. Poverty hits children hardest and creates an environment that is damaging to childrens development in every way mental, physical, emotional and spiritual. UNICEF recently released a report comparing life for children in 24 OECD countries. Australia ranked second from the bottom, with 12% of this nations children living in households where the total income was less than half the countrys median; 10% of the child population lives in households where no adult is employed; many will have only one parent and, as two-thirds of single parents have left school by the end of year 10, these children are likely to become part of a generational cycle of poverty. This book examines child poverty from a global and Australian perspective. What can be done to give impoverished children a better chance in life?

"Understanding poverty and what to do about it, is perhaps the central concern of all of economics. Yet the lay public almost never gets to hear what leading professional economists have to say about it. This volume brings together twenty-eight essays by some of the world leaders in the field, who were invited to tell the lay reader about the most important things they have learnt from their research that relate to poverty. The essays cover a wide array of topics: the first essay is about how poverty gets measured. The next section is about the causes of poverty and its persistence, and the ideas range from the impact of colonialism and globalization to the problems of "excessive" population growth, corruption and ethnic conflict. The next section is about policy: how should we fight poverty? The essays discuss how to get drug companies to produce more vaccines for the diseases of the poor, what we should and should not expect from micro-credit, what we should do about child labor, how to design welfare policies that work better and a host of other topics. The final section is about where the puzzles lie: what are the most important anomalies, the big gaps in the way economists think about poverty? The essays talk about the puzzling reluctance of Kenyan farmers to fertilizers, the enduring power of social relationships in economic transactions in developing countries and the need to understand where aspirations come from, and much else. Every essay is written with the aim of presenting the latest and the most sophisticated in economics without any recourse to jargon or technical language."--Publisher description