Search

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) have become a key antipoverty policy in Latin America in the last 25 years. The ultimate goal of this kind of programs is to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty through the promotion of human capital accumulation of children in vulnerable households. In this paper, we explore this issue by estimating the long-run effects of the largest CCT in Latin America: the Brazilian Bolsa Familia. Through a combination of the two-stage-two-sample method and a difference-in-differences approach, we find evidence consistent with a positive long-run impact of Bolsa Familia among former beneficiaries. In particular, we find a significant positive effect on education and labor income, and a negative effect on the likelihood of being a current beneficiary of this social transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many post-secondary institutions have implemented anti-poverty programs to address students' basic needs insecurities. This study examined the provision of 17 types of basic needs programs at Texas Hispanic-serving institutions over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic with the aim to identify changes in the number and types of programs offered as well as factors that may influence the presence of specific types of basic needs programs on campus. While the average number of basic needs programs per institution varied little over time, the specific types of programs that were offered changed. Institution type as a 2-year or 4-year institution was associated with providing on-campus mental health services, on-campus physical health services, and after-school care for students' children at pre-pandemic and anticipated post-pandemic time points and employing students and free food or meal vouchers at the pre-pandemic time point. The percentage of students receiving Pell Grants was associated with basic needs programs to assist students applying for public services and referrals to off-campus health services pre-pandemic and anticipated post-pandemic. The presence of an on-campus free food pantry was associated with the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants at the anticipated post-pandemic time point only. Over the course of the pandemic, there were changes to the types of basic needs programs offered. Some types of basic needs programs were associated with institutional and/or student characteristics. Given the continued presence of basic needs programs through the course of the pandemic and into the post-pandemic period, the use of these kinds of programs and services to support students, while influenced by external factors such as the pandemic, appears institutionally established as a way to facilitate going to college for students in need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at programs and policies related to child labor and youth employment in the United States in the decades after 1945. The author argues that an earlier focus on protection of children and youth in the labor market was transformed into a focus on cooperating with private companies to get youths into jobs. Topics include Mobilization for Youth, a youth jobs program that was part of the 1960s War on Poverty, and the National Child Labor Committee.

The article examines the impact of climate change on U.S. anti-poverty programs. Topics include how various levels of government utilize welfare programs in response to extreme weather events such as hurricanes and wildfires; highlights weaknesses in the current system, with a focus on Congress and recent recovery efforts, including insights from pandemic response; and an agenda for adapting U.S. welfare programs to address the challenges posed by climate change.

The earned income tax credit (EITC) is one of the largest antipoverty programs in the United States. Although extensive research suggests the EITC is linked to various positive parent and child outcomes, limited attention has been paid to how familial obligations shape ways in which the EITC is spent. Research indicates that social networks of extended family and friends can be vital to low-income families' social and economic well-being, suggesting the importance of exploring their roles in shaping EITC spending decisions. Drawing from in-depth interviews with primarily women of color, this article reveals how some women maintain extended family caregiving arrangements through monetary gifts from their EITC. The women's narratives illustrate how they identified the social and economic value of the caregiving and how caregiving and monetary reciprocity facilitated the maintenance of intergenerational social support; they also expose limitations of current policies designed to support care arrangements among low-income families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable Anti-Poverty Program in Camarines Sur is a collaborative extension efforts of the four State Universities and Colleges (SUCs) in Camarines Sur funded by CHED-NAFES intended to alleviate poverty by creating sustainable livelihood and employment opportunities among the four (4) priority municipalities (Buhi, Presentacion, Balatan, and Sipocot) in Camarines Sur. Specifically, at least 25% of the beneficiaries were able to: acquire and adopt the knowledge and skills in livelihood training and income-generating opportunities; produce skilled workers in their localities; engage in small viable enterprise among communities; and establish climate-smart, resilient, productive, gendersensitive and responsible communities. The project implemented with some significant activities: coordination meetings with the target LGUs, DSWD, and other stakeholders in the setting up of venues and recruitment of beneficiaries; procurement of supplies and materials; conduct of the technology and capability enhancement training in the adopted communities were given emphasis. Monitoring and evaluating the project and posttraining assistance for technology adoption also were considered. Although the procurement of materials and climate change were found to be a major setback in completing the project in the targeted time, the team had taken necessary remedial measures and actions to address the problems meet. Hence the project had achieved its objectives. There were 28 techno-transfer courses and 13 capability buildings conducted in four (4) marginalized sector of Camarines Sur. SAPP Project produced 1,040 trained individuals (503 for technology transfer and 537 for capability enhancement). Five hundred three (503) of 540 or 93.15% beneficiaries acquired/adopted the Knowledge Skills and Attitudes (KSA) of the trainings conducted. Nevertheless, out of 503 trained individuals, 175 or 34.79 %, of beneficiaries engaged employment/entrepreneurial undertakings. While, a total of 67.13% (537/800) beneficiaries enhanced the skills in entrepreneurship, climate-smart, gender-sensitive and responsible communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the insurgent practices of members of the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) program from 1965–1973. VISTA is situated historically in relation to New Left community organizing projects and the War on Poverty. Testimonials of VISTA workers demonstrate that many developed political perspectives critical of the "war" in which they had enlisted. Records of collective mobilization chart how VISTA workers attempted to form a labor union and bring the program under community control. Their largest organization, the National VISTA Alliance, represented a form of social justice unionism ante litteram within and against the U.S. state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early twentieth century, Asian Americans and Latinos organized along national origin lines and focused on assimilation; By the 1960s and 1970s, community organizers from both groups began to form panethnic community service organizations (CSOs) that emphasized solidarity. I argue that focusing on the rise of panethnic CSOs reveals an underappreciated mechanism that has mobilized Asian Americans and Latinos—the welfare state. The War on Poverty programs incentivized non-black minority community organizers to form panethnic CSOs to gain access to state resources and serve the economically disadvantaged in their communities. Drawing on extensive archival research, I identify this mechanism and test it with my original dataset of 818 Asian American and Latino advocacy organizations and CSOs. Leveraging the Reagan budget cut, I show that dismantling the War on Poverty programs reduced the founding rate of panethnic CSOs. I further estimated that a 1 percent increase in federal funding was associated with the increase of the two panethnic CSOs during the War on Poverty. The findings demonstrate how access to state resources forces activists among non-primary beneficiary groups to build new political identities that fit the dominant image of the policy beneficiaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have indicated government transfers greatly alleviate poverty among older Americans. Yet recent social policy changes were suggested to increase older Americans' fiscal insecurity. New evidence is needed to expand the evaluation of government transfers. Longitudinal Health and Retirement Study data from 2002 to 2014 were used. We computed individuals' poverty status both when household income included and did not include government transfers. Results indicated the poverty rate dropped dramatically when household income included government transfers. The poverty alleviation effect was significantly greater among people who were female, older, members of a minority group, having fewer years of education, residing in the South, and living in a bigger household. Evidence from this study solidified the overall poverty alleviation effect of government transfers in old age. Differential effects among various demographic groups could be attributed to their initial status and divergent political beliefs about who should receive government transfers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The negative impacts of the Great Recession (GR) (2007 to 2009) on the lives of families with low incomes warrant social work concerns about how well antipoverty policy responded to meet economic needs over this period and since. Given America's long-standing tension between welfare state adequacy and market-oriented policies, how well did the safety net respond to the economic downturn? Did GR-era changes reverse or accelerate trends in public assistance? This article examines key policy changes and indicators of caseloads, inclusion, and generosity for three antipoverty policies: the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly Food Stamp Program), and the Earned Income Tax Credit from 2007 to 2017. Authors' analysis shows a continuation of market-oriented U.S. antipoverty policy. Authors argue that the reemphasis of conditioning benefits on employment undermines the countercyclical feature of the social safety net and perpetuates the inequitable redistribution of public resources between those inside and outside of the labor market. Authors discuss social workers' role in strengthening antipoverty policies to improve the economic well-being of people with low incomes and the economic justice of the social safety net. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is one of the largest anti-poverty programs in the United States, providing over $67 billion to more than 27 million families for the tax year 2016, an average of $2,455. By subsidizing the earnings of low-income workers, the EITC reduces poverty both directly through the credit itself and indirectly through labor supply incentives. The two primary determinants of the amount a tax unit receives are earned income and number of children. Many studies define eligibility based on the presence of children in a household and separate analyses by marital status, a reflection of the fundamentally different incentives the EITC poses for single- and dual-earner households. However, as the EITC theoretically encourages fertility and generally discourages marriage, endogenous responses along these two dimensions could bias estimates which rely on them for identification and sample selection. In this paper, I revisit the classic question of the EITC's labor market effects while exploiting a source of arguably exogenous variation in EITC receipt that does not rely on these potentially endogenous characteristics: birth timing around the end of the calendar year. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation, my results show positive earnings and employment effects for unmarried women in the 12 months following their first/only child's birth, including for those with a high school degree or less (low-ed). Overall, the results are usually small and insignificant for married women, with the exception of negative (and sometimes significant) effects on earnings for low-ed married women. Using a difference-in-discontinuities approach, I separate the income effect of the credit itself from the information effect, which, I argue, occurs when women receive the EITC for the first time. I show that, while the income effect is negative across all groups of women, the information effects are positive for unmarried women and negative for married women, again consistent with theory and the body of evidence on the EITC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on segregationists like U.S. senators James O. Eastland and John C. Stennis, hoped the federal government would include northeast Mississippi in its new Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) a Great Society program. It mentions segregationists called "Appalachian Mississippi" countered the War on Poverty's economic empowerment of rural Black communities. It also mentions Mississippi's Black freedom struggle through institutions for public housing, cooperative agriculture.

Non‐elected, non‐appointed federal employees, referred to as "bureaucrats," are among the many policy actors that participate in policy discourse. This article investigates whether bureaucrats' administrative discourse promotes economic equality, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned. Based on a qualitative analysis of data from congressional testimonies (n = 34) before and after the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, this study discusses the role of public administrators as contributors to welfare policy discourse and the resulting implications for the fight for equality and equal citizenship. It finds that bureaucrats' welfare policy discourse marginalized vulnerable populations, particularly African American women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantity vouchers are used in redistributive programs to shield participants from price variation and alter their consumption patterns. However, because participants are insensitive to prices, vendors of program goods are incentivized to price discriminate between program and non-program customers. I study these trade-offs in the context of a reform to reduce price discrimination in the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which provides a quantity voucher for nutritious foods to low-income mothers and children. The reform caused vendors to drop out, reducing program take-up. In addition, smaller vendors increased prices charged to non-WIC shoppers by 6.4 percent. (JEL H75, I18, I32, I38, J13, J16) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author discusses tangled representations of race in America and salvaging African American culture from the wreckage of Jim Crow, black folklorists helped cultivate a heightened state of black consciousness. It mentions researchers and scholars propelled the goals of the Black Power Movement and substantive desegregation, transformation of the criminal justice system, antipoverty programs, and the incorporation of black history into school curricula.

Macro-level policy changes in the US welfare system can shift the boundaries of existing organizational welfare service funding arrangements. This in-depth archival case study examines the organizational boundary work of philanthropic actors at the United Foundation of Detroit during the War on Poverty era (1964–74). The study finds that the United Foundation responded to social and welfare changes by protecting and expanding its power and authority in its welfare organizational ecosystem. It used specific mechanisms, including managerial tools and ideologies, to exert greater control over nonprofit funding and service provision in this ecosystem, which altered the power dynamics and relationships between funding and nonprofit service organizations. Applying a boundary work lens to this historical period can assist social workers in building more equitable relationships with funders in the dynamic, frequently market-driven welfare system of today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research on the influence of conditional cash transfers-widespread antipoverty programs-on migration has tended to focus on beneficiaries as a homogenous unit. Drawing on feminist critiques of the contemporary international antipoverty agenda, this article views both conditional cash transfer programs and migration patterns from a gender-sensitive lens. Conditional cash transfers rely on a gendered division of labor in which the informal work of women is particularly called upon in order to fulfill program requirements. This work contends that conditional cash transfers emphasize gender responsibilities for women as mothers and caretakers, which mark their belonging in the domestic sphere and limit the likelihood of their migration while making no such demands on beneficiary men or nonbeneficiaries. Using logistic and multinomial logistic regression models and data from the Mexican Family Life Survey, the analysis finds evidence supporting the hypothesis that conditional cash transfer participation disproportionately limits migration for beneficiary women. This study broadly argues that the impact of such antipoverty programs is more gendered than previously thought and emphasizes the importance of examining previously studied outcomes in ways that consider the specific subject locations of recipients in order to better understand both the logics underlying development policy and the process of migration itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spending on cash assistance from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program has declined throughout the United States in recent decades. Simultaneously, spending on the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs has increased. This article investigates whether retrenchment of TANF has led to increases in the participation in and levels of benefit receipt of SNAP and SSI. Applying a differences-in-differences approach on household income data from 1997 to 2015, we find that a $50 policy-induced decline in states' TANF cash assistance allocations leads to an increase of $17–$32 per month in SNAP and SSI benefit allocations among single-mother households. From a household perspective, these findings suggest that SNAP and SSI benefits have partially offset TANF's decline. From a state incentive perspective, we find state governments have the ability, and a financial incentive, to shift social assistance caseloads to the federal government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examines the role of home-to-new-job-hub distance on employment propensity using a unique data set compiled from integrated micro-level administrative records of work-eligible welfare recipients and earnings. Our empirical findings confirm the spatial mismatch hypothesis. Our home-to-new-job-hub distance measure is an innovative weighted measure incorporating both abundance of actual employment opportunities and geographic distance. Other unique contributions of this study include using point-to-point residence and job hub locational information, modelling with community controls and industry-specific analysis. This study also identifies policy implications in advancing employment prospects of inner-city residents receiving government assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“The Politics of International Volunteerism” examines Volunteers to America (VTA), a little known program that returned Peace Corps volunteers, VTA participants and program staff often called the “reverse Peace Corps.” Lasting from 1967 to 1971 under the United States Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs, the VTA brought international volunteers from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to work alongside their American counterparts in War on Poverty initiatives throughout the United States. VTA volunteers’ direct experiences in confronting American forms of racism and poverty led many to question not only the efficacy of their work, but also more broadly America’s role in the world, its model of development, and its commitment to universal values. Operating as a pilot program, the VTA never received full congressional approval. The idea of placing foreign volunteers in American communities made policy makers uncomfortable and was quickly defunded by Congress in 1971 when the Peace Corps sought further expansion of the program. Despite its short history, the VTA and the volunteers’ encounters in the United States offers a way of rethinking the relationship between the Peace Corps and postwar development ideas and the possibilities and limitations of international volunteer programs in the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article refers to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1967 in the United States, anti-poverty programs, and collaboration between the public and private sectors. The JOBS program provides training and job opportunities for hard-core unemployed workers and the cost of training is subsidized by the government. The Model Cities Program involves the private citizen in government-funded, social improvement programs based on Housing and Urban Development criteria for model neighborhoods. The characteristics of unskilled trainees, National Alliance of Businessmen, and Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 are mentioned, as well as the expected demand for transportation services, inflationary trend, and executive interchange plan.

In the 1960s, a new and popular theory of “new careers” proposed to address urban poverty and deindustrialization by growing the human services sector and hiring so-called nonprofessional workers to aid the delivery of those services. This strategy gained traction in social scientific, philanthropic, and bureaucratic circles and shaped Great Society legislation, which allocated federal grants to create entry-level jobs and professionalizing career ladders in the fields of health, education, and welfare. The implementation of this strategy had consequences for the human service organizations that received federal funds, as well as for the people hired into the new positions. Instead of building ladders to professional employment, efforts produced dead-end positions that left the predominantly African American women hired as aides in poverty. Even as the new careers experiment helped usher in a post-industrial economy, it reinforced the stratification of the labor market along lines of race, gender, and credentials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explains cross-subsidies and provides the standard economic argument against them in the U.S.

When Lyndon Johnson declared a "War on Poverty" in 1964, the Protestant president enlisted many leading American Catholics, whose church had long committed itself to assisting the disadvantaged. Yet Johnson's outreach was rife with risk in a nation which, while still mourning the loss of its first Catholic president, in many ways continued to embrace secularism in its politics, society, and culture. This study explores the cooperation between the Johnson administration and Catholic leaders in the passage and implementation of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the primary weapon in Johnson's war. It concludes that although Johnson and his successors ultimately failed in their battles to eliminate poverty in the United States, American Catholics largely succeeded in securing a place for their church on the front lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While average family size was the same, average annual expenditures of families who have children and were receiving means-tested government assistance were about half the amount spent by families not receiving assistance. Food, housing, and transportation took up the greatest share of the family budget regardless of whether any assistance was received. Among families receiving means-tested government assistance, Medicaid was the program with the highest participation rate (84.1 percent) and public assistance was the program with the lowest participation rate (7.0 percent). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to the issue of the journal that discusses topics such as the political impact of urban unrest, the War on Poverty campaign, and mobilization of the working class in Canada.

Few economic indicators have more salience and pervasive financial impact on everyday lives in the United States than poverty measures. Nevertheless, policymakers, researchers, advocates, and legislators generally do not understand the details of poverty measure mechanics. These detailed mechanics shape and reshape poverty measures and the too often uninformed responses and remedies. This Article will build a bridge from personal portraits of families living in poverty to the resource allocations that failed them by exposing the specific detailed mechanics underlying the Census Bureau's official (OPM) and supplemental poverty measures (SPM). Too often, when we confront the problem of poverty, the focus is on the lives and behavior of those suffering the burdens of poverty and not on the inadequacy of resource allocations in antipoverty programs. The purpose of poverty measures should be to expose the effectiveness and failures of antipoverty programs so that they can be improved, not to scrutinize the lives and characteristics of those who are enduring these hardships. This Article exposes poverty measures through the details of the United States' current antipoverty programs, including the demographics of the populations who are included as beneficiaries and those that are left without adequate resources to survive. After reverse engineering the OPM and SPM, the Article describes the raw data from the starting population universes but then reveals the details of U.S. citizens and residents who have been intentionally excluded from the poverty analysis. The Article reveals that the excluded population is likely disproportionately poor and, thus, their erasure from the starting population universe understates derived poverty rates. Therefore, as a starting point, the OPM and SPM exclude millions of vulnerable Americans from the Census Bureau's poverty measurement analyses. Nevertheless, the Article continues its poverty measure analysis using the Census Bureau's original databases and rebuilds the OPM and SPM from the original population universes by applying each resource allocation program by program until demographic patterns emerge of who is lifted out of poverty proportionately or disproportionately in accordance with their pre-allocation poverty percentages in the population universes. By shifting the focus from Americans who suffer scarcity to the details of each antipoverty program and the demographics of who and in what proportion they are served by these programs, we better understand why almost 50 million Americans, including 16 million children, are not adequately provided for; do not have the necessary life resources; are struggling day in and day out; have been "nickel and dimed"; and are not getting by in the United States; and who, because of the misallocation (not lack) of resources, suffer the persistent and pernicious plight of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]