Poverty is correlated with crime, but it is widely assumed that it should not be a defense. In the 1970s, Judge David Bazelon challenged this assumption, proposing a rotten social background defense, that is, how growing up under circumstances of severe deprivation can subsequently impact a...

The puzzle of why the cycle of poverty persists and upward socioeconomic mobility is so difficult has long captivated scholars and the public alike. Yet with all of the attention that has been paid to poverty, the crucial role of the law, particularly state and local law, in perpetuating poverty...

The problem of land inequality has attracted renewed interest in the development literature due to its potential effects on the welfare of smallholder farmers. Poverty reduction is an important sustainable development goal and a clearer understanding of the factors that could lead to poverty is...

Macroeconomic instability has been increasingly considered as a factor lowering average income growth and, in this way, is a factor slowing down poverty reduction. But it can also result in slower poverty reduction for a given average rate of growth, due to poverty traps, often examined at the...

Estimates of poverty are highly sensitive to price and income measures across time and space. This paper offers a complementary approach to traditional poverty measurement that ensures comparability: we use nighttime light as a proxy for poverty measurement. We measure the percentage of...

This study appraises non-monetary multidimensional poverty in Nigeria using the novel first order dominance approach developed by Arndt et al. (2012). It examines five dimensions of deprivation: education, water, sanitation, shelter, and energy-using comparable datasets, the Nigeria Demographic...

We introduce two separate datasets (The Global Consumption Dataset (GCD) and The Global Income Dataset (GID)) containing an unprecedented portrait of consumption and income of persons over time, within and across countries, around the world. The benchmark version of the dataset presents...

Nigeria has recorded impressive growth in the last decade, yet the impact of this growth on poverty reduction remains unclear. This paper appraises spatial and temporal non-monetary multidimensional poverty in Nigeria using the first-order dominance approach. It examines five welfare indicators:...

This paper estimates urban and rural poverty rates across five Chinese administrative regions (Shanghai, Liaoning, Guangdong, Henan and Gansu) in 2014 using representative household level data from the China Family Panel Studies survey. The types of government transfer payments that households...

This paper reflects on the relationship between economic (quantitative) and anthropological (qualitative) approaches to the analysis of poverty in developing countries. Drawing on detailed evidence from Mozambique, we argue that different research approaches do not merely see the same poverty...