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Advances in measuring poverty in non-monetary terms enable governments to track social progress on ends, the things that societies value doing and being. Using a national-level regression-based empirical strategy, this research demonstrates the magnitude of previously unmeasured policy effects on material deprivation, a non-monetary indicator of poverty. We apply this methodology to a comparative microdata set covering 32 European countries and estimate the average marginal effect of a small universal income increase on material deprivation. We illustrate the impact of the income transfer from various policy angles commonly used when analyzing the poverty reduction effects of social transfers. We show how impacts vary with characteristics such as country and household deprivation levels and the type of social transfers received. The methodology enables an analysis of the redistributive impact of social transfers on non-monetary social outcomes and is also suitable for other non-monetary social outcomes such as housing deprivation and food insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty reduction is a complex task. We investigate whether the position of single-parent families and single working-age adults has improved in a political context that has—at least rhetorically—prioritized poverty reduction across all higher-level jurisdictions in Canada. Both groups experience very high poverty rates. We analyze income poverty changes from 1999 to 2017 in a relative sense (compared to the typical Canadian) and an absolute sense (purchasing power). Controlling for demographic and regional characteristics, we find that the poverty disadvantage declined for both groups. Improvements for single-parent families were strong and widespread across provinces. Those for single adults of working age were smaller and more concentrated in provinces experiencing stronger economic growth. These results support the claim that governments prioritized the inclusion of families with dependent children while the inclusion of single working-age adults was largely left to the fortunes of the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper examines the issue of poverty among people with serious mental illness (SMI), positioning it as a key issue to be confronted by community mental health systems and practitioners. The paper reviews three perspectives on poverty, considering how each sheds light on poverty among people with SMI, and their implications for action: (a) monetary resources, (b) basic needs, and (c) capabilities. The paper argues that community mental health programs and systems are currently unable to address poverty as they are overly focused on individual‐level interventions that, on their own, cannot raise people out of poverty. The paper calls for a social justice value, informed by the concept of citizenship, as a necessary complement to the recovery concept that has informed community mental health practice for almost 25 years. Finally, the paper argues that community psychologists, with their concepts, methods, and values, are well positioned to contribute to this important issue. However, it also contends that addressing poverty requires collaboration from community psychologists with researchers and practitioners from other fields and domains of expertise to begin to make progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

North America lags behind in the use of outcome-based indicators such as material deprivation to study child poverty. Instead, income indicators dominate research and policy making. A large body of international research concludes that income poverty and material deprivation are complementary indicators because each measures specific but related aspects of material well-being. For children this distinction is even more pertinent because children have specific needs and their material circumstances affect both their current and future well-being. This research uses data from Ontario to investigate whether material deprivation also contributes to a better understanding of child poverty in North America. It shows that the choice of poverty indicator affects estimates of the level of child poverty, its correlates, and the success of policy interventions in reaching poor children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a panel from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (1994-2004), this paper investigates to what extent Russian households have been able to maintain their living standards while suffering income shocks. Consumption smoothing is modelled by means of an equilibrium correction mechanism, which disentangles short-run dynamics and long-run equilibrium adjustments. GMM estimation is used to control for individual household effects in the presence of dynamics. Additionally, we differentiate between food and non-food consumption, positive and negative shocks, rural and urban areas, and several levels of poverty risk. We find that dynamics are important in the consumption equation, and that estimates are sensitive to imputation errors in home food production. No strong claims can be made regarding heterogeneity in smoothing behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial poverty indicators assess which people have few financial resources and are thereby at risk of having an unacceptably low living standard. Most countries use one or several 'official' poverty indicators, but they typically use either an absolute or a relative benchmark to determine what is unacceptable; absolute benchmarks are based on basic needs or rights while relative benchmarks depend on what is considered to be a 'normal' living standard. Applying the absolute U.S. and the relative EU poverty indicators on the U.S. and 15 EU member states, this research shows that it makes sense to use both benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multidimensional nature of poverty has long been acknowledged; even persons with sufficient financial resources may be unable to achieve satisfactory levels of well-being in other dimensions. However, traditional monetary poverty analyses still play a predominant role in the formulation of poverty reduction strategies. In this paper we analyze the consequences of using monetary poverty as a proxy for deprivation in the physical environment of children in the Republic of Congo by studying the degree of overlap between these dimensions. Our results indicate that incidence rates of poverty and deprivation differ substantially in magnitude; that high risk poverty characteristics do not necessarily correspond to high risk deprivation characteristics; and that the relation between poverty and deprivation in the physical environment is positive but not very strong. We conclude that monetary poverty indicators are a blunt tool for identifying vulnerable groups with regard to dimensions of the physical environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates a policy change from universal to means-tested child allowances in terms of targeting efficiency and poverty reduction, taking the introduction of the latter form of benefits in Russia as a case-study. We use the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) from 2000 to 2004 to analyse the impact of the reforms and to simulate the effects of various means-tested and universal child benefit schemes. Since the reforms in 2000, more children have received benefits and there has been improved targeting of low income households. Nevertheless, both inclusion and exclusion errors are considerable and although the poverty reduction impact has improved marginally since the reforms, its effect on child poverty has been small. Our simulations show that universal schemes achieve additional poverty reductions with regard to all indicators because previously excluded children now also receive a benefit. However, size matters most: only by increasing benefit levels considerably can more substantial poverty reductions be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Counting the Poor: New Thinking About European Poverty Measures and Lessons for the United States," by Douglas J. Besharov and Kenneth A. Couch.