Poverty- Finding the cause and how it affects the people experiencing it

Poverty is defined as being in a state such that a person doesn’t have or cannot afford to have the necessities. Throughout the world, developed countries usually tend to have a lesser percentage of their population under poverty, whereas developing and under-developed nations tend to have a huge portion of their population living under poverty. Minorities are the ones who live in poverty, especially in developed countries.

To measure and compare poverty between multiple nations, there are various indexes that decide how severe poverty is. One such index is called the Human Poverty Index. It was developed by United Nations, in addition to the Human Development Index. There is another index, whose data is comparable to the international standards, called Multidimensional Poverty Index. These indexes are often compared with other countries’ data to see which country has reduced the percentage of people living in poverty.

Cited below are some of the scholarly articles that I would be annotating for the second major assignment:

1) O’Connor, Alice. “When Measurements Matter: Poverty, Wealth, and the Politics of Inequality in the United States.” History of Political Economy, Duke University Press, 1 June 2020, read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article-abstract/52/3/589/160604/When-Measurements-Matter-Poverty-Wealth-and-the.

Notes– The article compares the economic inequality situation in the 1960s with the current times. It argues how there was poverty, back in the day, but the situation was misrepresented for the public. It also talks about the War on Poverty, an unofficial term for a legislation in the 1960s. 

This scholarly article is slightly difficult to compress into 3 main sentences, mainly because it has a lot of information that seems relevant to the topic and hence filtering that information is the difficult part.

2) Gayán, Navarro, Carlos, et al. “An Assessment of Poverty Determinants in U.S. Census Tracts, 1970–2010.” Growth & Change, vol. 51, no. 3, Sept. 2020, pp. 977–999. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/grow.12389.

Notes– This article argues that finding the causes of poverty is necessary to fight poverty but not sufficient enough. The authors support their arguments by comparing various statistics of the MSAs(Metropolitan Statistical Areas) of the US and saying that poverty tends to be higher near the center of MSA, while near the suburbs, the poverty is relatively low.  

It isn’t that difficult to summarize the main points of this scholarly article into 3 sentences as the arguments presented by the authors are pretty clear and easy to comprehend, except for one point and that is the tabular data is a bit difficult to analyze.

3) Bohr, Jeremiah, and Anna C McCreery. “Do Energy Burdens Contribute to Economic Poverty in the United States? A Panel Analysis.” Social Forces, vol. 99, no. 1, 1 Sept. 2020, pp. 155–177., doi:10.1093/sf/soz131.

Notes- This article tries to find out whether or not electricity consumption is a determinant of poverty by focusing on a certain group of people who spend 10% or more, of their income, on heating and energy. The authors used data on energy consumption from 1999-2017 and found out that those who were energy-burdened had a higher chance of staying in poverty.

It wasn’t that difficult to compress this article mainly because the sentences were easy to understand as well as the data, table, and analysis were presented in such a way that it made it quite easy for me to interpret it.

 

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