Causes of Poverty
The causes of poverty are multifaceted and can include factors such as lack of access to education, healthcare, and employment opportunities, as well as systemic issues like discrimination and unequal distribution of resources. Additionally, economic factors such as low wages, high cost of living, and economic downturns can contribute to poverty. These causes often intersect and compound each other, leading to complex and entrenched poverty situations.
7 Key excerpts on "Causes of Poverty"
eBook - ePubSocial Work with Children and Families
Developing Advanced Practice
- Penelope Welbourne(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...From a structural theoretical perspective, poverty is linked to the cycle of market fluctuations and market-related factors such as low wages, low unemployment benefits, unemployment, etc. There are also structural barriers to escaping poverty including poor education, poor health services and low access to credit, among other things. These different theoretical perspectives suggest different policy approaches to the problem of poverty: attempting to change the attitudes and skills of poor individuals – ‘individual’ theories; challenging the ‘culture of poverty’ through changing social norms and values; and lastly through changing the economic and political structures that affect the kind of life choices poorer people can make and maximising their ability to be socially mobile while protecting the income of those who are unable to earn enough for themselves. Poverty is not a straightforward concept. The title of this chapter reflects both the complexity of the idea of poverty in a post-industrial and global context, and the complexity of the relationship between social work and poverty, given the high proportion of its clients who are poor. Poverty may be defined in different ways, bringing different numbers of people into the definition depending upon its reference points. The UN Definition of Poverty is set out below. It highlights the wide-ranging effects of poverty, which go beyond their immediate physical consequences, such as hunger and untreated illness. Fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. It means not having enough to feed and clothe a family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities...
eBook - ePubPoverty
A New Perspective
- George L. Wilber, George L. Wilber(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- The University Press of Kentucky(Publisher)
...Thurow (1969:20) expresses the sentiment well when he says, “Depending on usage and aims, there are many relevant definitions of poverty. There is no reason why the definitions should be the same for economic, sociological, or cultural poverty or why the same individuals should be identified under different definitions. There is also no reason why the same definition should be used for every program designed to help the poor.” It may be added that many of us are “hamstrung” by traditional academic backgrounds which condition us to think in terms of economic, sociological, or other relatively narrow perspectives. What does it really matter whether a poverty property is considered part of the realm of some academic discipline? There should be no monopoly on properties included in an analytical model. Further, many of the commonsense explanations of poverty are not sufficiently articulated or complete to permit reasonable examination with empirical data. The simply stated argument that people are poor because they are lazy illustrates a single-factor explanation which is unlikely to explain much of the variance. The argument that poor people are more likely to suffer ill health illustrates the problem of distinguishing antecedent from consequence. The incidence of high fertility among low income families is common knowledge, but what is known about cause-effect sequences? The main difficulty with such observations and arguments is that first, we are confining our efforts to explaining low income and, second, the arguments are bifactor statements of relationships lacking a clear causal-sequence hypothesis. Two of the broad attempts to develop an explanation of poverty are represented by the culture of poverty and the cycle of poverty concepts. Both of these concepts consider poverty as something economic; both contribute potentially useful notions about poverty...
...A historical distinction and discussion, still in evidence today, considers structural and behavioural reasons (Bradshaw 2000). This can also be systematised into: 1 Individual factors: lack of effort, lack of motivation, money mismanagement. 2 Structural factors: poor education, insufficient opportunities, an economic system that favours the rich. 3 Uncontrollable factors: fate, bad luck. (Leiser and Shemesh 2018, 89) This shows that there can be, and presumably are, many and varied explanations. They can and will, presumably, also change over time. So, it is not necessarily a stable situation, and further it can vary between countries, and even within countries it might be that all the factors influence part of the development in poverty. Looking into structural reasons, these relate to the fact that one can look at change in societal structures that cause, for example, loss of jobs and as a result a slide into subsequent poverty, at least if there are no existing social service safety nets. Change on the labour market in the wake of structural causes might thus be a reason for the number of people living in poverty, as some people for a number of possible reasons (educational attainment level, geography and age) are not able to get a new job. This can also be presented as a difference between supply and demand sides approaches with regard to labour market development. The supply side would focus on the willingness to work (i.e. to supply one’s labour), whereas the demand side is linked to whether there is, in fact, a demand for workers. For both demand and supply side there is the question whether even if having a job, if on a low wage is enough to avoid living in poverty, i.e...
eBook - ePubPoverty, the Bible, and Africa
Contextual Foundations for Helping the Poor
- Isaac Boaheng(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- HippoBooks(Publisher)
...Poverty therefore refers to low-level human capabilities and poor access to the means to achieving these capabilities. [13] The Social Exclusion Approach The social exclusion approach is the third perspective on understanding poverty. The social exclusion that poverty brings may be in the form of “either economic dimension (exclusion from the labor market opportunities to earn income) or a purely social dimension (exclusion from decision-making, social services, and access to community and family support).” [14] This approach to poverty emerged in France in the 1970s and 1980s as a means of explaining the precarious situation of the disadvantaged and marginalized due to their inability to take part in the major economic, political, and social enterprises. [15] The meaning of the expression “social exclusion” has metamorphosed over the years. [16] In the 1970s many people became unemployed due to decline in business activities. In such a context, the term exclusion was used to denote the process that led to the expulsion of people from the job market. In the 1990s, prevalent human rights issues led to defining “excludees” as those who are “partly or completely outside the effective scope of human rights.” [17] The social exclusion approach differs from the economic and capability deprivation approaches in that the latter focus on individual characteristics and circumstances while the former shifts attention to the relational quality of life (its social dimension). According to the exclusion approach, one may have high income and still be poor if there is lack of social order and hence, insecurity in the community. Moreover, the analysis of exclusion involves the study of societal structure and the conditions of the marginalized groups, such as minority groups and the landless. Social exclusion therefore involves cultural, institutional and social dimensions, which are absent in the first two approaches...
eBook - ePubPoverty as Ideology
Rescuing Social Justice from Global Development Agendas
- Andrew Martin Fischer(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Zed Books(Publisher)
...The proposed framework is based on two conceptual dimensions that are implicit in much of the ideas and policies relating to poverty and social needs. The first dimension deals the creation and division of wealth, which can be conceived in classical political economy terms as production, distribution and redistribution. The second deals with the more secondary, indirect and aggregated factors influencing the first, which can be divided into supply-side factors, demand-side factors and terms of trade or wages (or the relative valuing of labour and its fruits). The last of this second set was elaborated by placing terms of trade within theoretical debates around productivity, or what I call the fallacy of productivity reductionism. These interacting dimensions help to clarify how different approaches to conceptualising poverty and its reduction, as well as theoretical perspectives in economics and social sciences more generally, usually place selective emphasis on different combinations of elements across these two dimensions, even though all elements are needed to understand the evolution of social needs and the reproduction of poverty. While each approach might have its own insights, the Causes of Poverty can only be fully understood from a broader holistic perspective of all that is involved in the creation and division of wealth. More specifically, prevailing approaches to understanding poverty, which implicitly rely on neoclassical theoretical approaches, generally overlook several key dimensions, such as demand-side factors (with respect to employment and growth) and supply-side factors (with respect to social provisioning)...
eBook - ePubUnemployment and Social Exclusion
Landscapes of Labour inequality and Social Exclusion
- Sally Hardy, Paul Lawless, Ron Martin, Sally Hardy, Paul Lawless, Ron Martin(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In the American context the scale and dynamics of urban poverty have been the focus of intense discussion (Cisneros 1993 ; Murray 1984 ; Wilson 1987), some of which has in turn been assimilated into the British context (Lee 1994 ; Murray 1984). Policy and political communities have similarly contributed to wider discussion surrounding urban poverty. Governments have attempted to evaluate the overall impact of intervention on urban communities (for example, Department of the Environment 1994). Interestingly, perhaps the most intense political debate on the issue has been expressed by a range of inter-governmental organisations. The OECD, for example, has helped pull together experience on aspects of urban regeneration (Community Development Foundation/OECD 1993). Moreover, the European Union has made a number of interventions in the area, including its Poverty programmes. It has also introduced specific initiatives designed to enhance social integration and cohesion through social policy (Commission of the European Communities 1993a) and to incorporate unemployment-related issues into the wider consideration of macroeconomic policy, as exemplified in the White Paper Growth, Competitiveness, Employment (Commission of the European Communities 1994). The tenor of much of this thinking is expanded in the Green Paper on European Social Policy: ‘no democratic state or union of states can function without efforts towards economic cohesion and solidarity between poor and rich regions and between fortunate and disadvantaged social groups’ (Commission of the European Communities 1993b, p.21). Definition and Causation Controversy surrounding questions of definition and causation have been central to issues of urban poverty and social exclusion. Four perspectives will be considered here, although it should be stressed that this is very much a generalised overview of the problem and these interpretations are not mutually exclusive...
eBook - ePubWomen's History, Britain 1700-1850
An Introduction
- Hannah Barker, Elaine Chalus, Hannah Barker, Elaine Chalus(Authors)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Trade could also experience a slow-down after severe weather conditions and bad harvests, because labouring families had to devote a much larger proportion of their disposable income to buying food, leaving little or no money to spend on manufactured goods. Finally, weather could have other sorts of impact on the poorest people. Harsh winter weather drove up the price of fuel and made the misery of thin clothing, insufficient bedding and inadequate housing all the more painful. 12 Bodily causes of female poverty: illness and the lifecycle Illness has long been recognized as one of the chief Causes of Poverty. 13 Typhus, typhoid fever, influenza, and smallpox were all epidemic (and to some extent endemic) during the eighteenth century and their propensity to kill their victims depended on a variety of factors including gender, age, and nutritional health. The nineteenth century brought new terrors to densely populated urban areas in the form of cholera. Other maladies such as malaria and tuberculosis were chronic and could have a debilitating influence over months or years before they either killed the patient or were cured. 14 Women juggled the economic impact of the illness of breadwinners, the consequences of their own ailments, the problems posed by children’s ill-health, which kept mothers away from work, and the new expenses imposed by illness itself. Medical attention, surgical procedures, medicines, and nursing might all have to be paid for at a time when families were least well placed to meet additional costs. Life-cycle poverty, on the other hand, is a phrase that has been coined to characterize those factors which nudged people into hardship at predictable points during their lives. Poor girls had only one real chance to improve their life-chances for prosperity–via a canny marriage–and life became precarious if marriage plans went awry...
