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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]

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 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.