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Poverty and teenage pregnancy are common in low‐and‐middle‐income countries and can impede the development of healthy parent‐child relationships. This study aimed to test whether a home‐visiting intervention could improve early attachment relationships between adolescent mothers and their infants living in poverty in Brazil. Analyses were conducted on secondary outcomes from a randomized controlled trial (NCT0280718) testing the efficacy of a home‐visiting program, Primeiros Laços, on adolescent mothers’ health and parenting skills and their infants’ development. Pregnant youth were randomized to intervention (n = 40) or care‐as‐usual (CAU, n = 40) from the first trimester of pregnancy until infants were aged 24 months. Mother‐infant attachment was coded during a mother‐infant interaction when the infants were aged 12 months. Electrophysiological correlates of social processing (mean amplitude of the Nc component) were measured while infants viewed facial images of the mother and a stranger at age 6 months. Infants in the intervention group were more securely attached and more involved with their mothers than those receiving CAU at 12 months. Smaller Nc amplitudes to the mother's face at 6 months were associated with better social behavior at 12 months. Our findings indicate that the Primeiros Laços Program is effective in enhancing the development of mother‐infant attachment.

This paper reflects critically on the results of a vulnerability assessment process at the household and community scale using a quantitative vulnerabilities and capacities index. It validates a methodology for a social vulnerability assessment at the local scale in 62 villages across four agro-ecological/livelihood zones in Sindh Province, Pakistan. The study finds that the move from vulnerability narratives to numbers improves the comparability and communicational strength of the concept. The depth and nuance of vulnerability, however, can be realised only by a return to narrative. Caution is needed, therefore: the index can be used in conjunction with qualitative assessments, but not instead of them. More substantively, the results show that vulnerability is more a function of historico-political economic factors and cultural ethos than any biophysical changes wrought by climate. The emerging gendered vulnerability picture revealed extremes of poverty and a lack of capacity to cope with contemporary environmental and social stresses.

A variety of new research approaches are providing new ways to better understand the developmental mechanisms through which poverty affects children's development. However, studies of child poverty often characterize samples using different markers of poverty, making it difficult to contrast and reconcile findings across studies. Ideally, scientists can maximize the benefits of multiple disciplinary approaches if data from different kinds of studies can be directly compared and linked. Here, we suggest that individual studies can increase their potential usefulness by including a small set of common key variables to assess socioeconomic status and family income. These common variables can be used to (a) make direct comparisons between studies and (b) better enable diversity of subjects and aggregation of data regarding many facets of poverty that would be difficult within any single study. If kept brief, these items can be easily balanced with the need for investigators to creatively address the research questions in their specific study designs. To advance this goal, we identify a small set of brief, low‐burden consensus measures that researchers could include in their studies to increase cross‐study data compatibility. These US based measures can be adopted for global contexts., Research on child poverty employs a variety of different indices of poverty, making it difficult to contrast and reconcile findings across studies. This Open Access paper provides a small set of brief key variables to assess socio‐economic status and family income, allowing studies to be directly compared. This measure can be used to make direct comparisons between studies and better enable diversity of subjects and aggregation of data regarding many facets of poverty that would be difficult within any single study.

This paper examines the vulnerability of households to disasters, using an asset vulnerability framework to represent livelihoods. Such frameworks are widely employed to analyse household poverty and focus on living conditions and well-being rather than money-metric measures of consumption and income. The conceptualisation of household vulnerability is a challenge in current studies on coping with disasters. The paper considers whether a capital assets framework is useful in identifying and assessing household vulnerability in the context of the Wenchuan earthquake in China in 2008. The framework has five categories of assets (financial, human, natural, physical, and social capital) and attempts to measure the resilience and vulnerability of households. When applied to a major disaster, asset-based methods face the problem of heterogeneity of the population, such as with regard to livelihood type or residence. Moreover, the effect of external interventions, such as the provision of relief assistance, must be taken into account.

This paper analyzes the socioeconomic, fiscal, and governance impact of gold mining in Mali. The analysis finds that, at the national level, mining plays an important role by contributing to export earnings and overall government fiscal revenue. In 2013, the mining sector represented 7 percent of gross domestic product, contributed 1.5 percent to growth in total gross domestic product, and accounted for 65 percent of total export earnings and 25 percent of total government budget revenues. At the local level, despite higher population growth, there is some evidence that outcomes (poverty and infrastructure services) are marginally better in mining communes compared with non-mining communes. Local governments receive fiscal windfalls that are spent significantly on education capital expenditures and current expenditures (salaries and non-salaries). Non-salary current expenditures are 10 times higher in mining areas. Analysis of the political economy of public service provision at the local level suggests that technical or absorptive capacities may be the bottleneck to increasing the local benefit of mining instead of corruption or accountability.