Summary In the 1970s, extensive areas of Brazilian Amazon were settled by landless farmers. These internal migrations prompted theoretical scholarship on the nature and outcomes of frontier expansion from three general frameworks: the capitalist penetration thesis, the inter-sectoral...

This paper summarises the conclusions from a more extensive report commissioned by the Treasury and the Ministry of Social Policy to provide an explanation of growth in welfare benefit receipt in Britain in the period 1971 to 1997. The study is structured around a simple heuristic model of four...

Evidence that welfare-to-work programmes in the USA succeed in boosting welfare recipients' earnings at modest cost has helped shape policy in Britain since 1997. So too has the belief that programmes that prioritise moving people into work quickly are more effective than ones that seek to...

Summary The present paper considers a sometimes contentious process of land reform presently occurring in Brazil. This process, referred to in the paper as Direct Action Land Reform (DALR), involves organizations such as the Landless Rural Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem...

Poverty takes many forms. Using data from the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this article (1) distinguishes different kinds of childhood poverty, defined in terms of the spacing, severity, and duration of spells; and (2) establishes the extent and distribution of childhood poverty,...