Documents poverty alleviation 232 results

"There has not been much progress on the poverty front in Europe over recent decades, at least if we take it as a relative phenomenon in affluent societies. There is a lot of pessimism about the possibility of making any real progress at all. Some argue that adequate poverty relief is simply too expensive or that it would put too much of a redistributive burden on the electorally powerful, making it politically difficult, if not infeasible. Another prominent argument is that wage floors and thus out-of-work benefit levels are inexorably under pressure, making poverty relief both harder to achieve and more expensive in budgetary terms. This paper sets out these accounts and focuses on what has been happening to statutory, absolute and effective wage floors in Europe over the past decades. We ask whether progress on the poverty front through pushing up wage floors and subsequently out-of-work benefits is a realistic prospect. We see reasons for optimism."

"This report focuses on unemployment and minimum income benefits for people of working age. Individuals with short or no employment records (mainly young people), the self-employed, those with non-standard working arrangements, and the long-term unemployed are often not entitled to higher-tier, or any, unemployment benefits. No Member State was identified where more than 80% of those entitled to minimum income benefits receive them. Benefit recipients at higher risk of having an inadequate income include those without access to social housing in areas with high housing costs, unemployed individuals whose most recent job was low paid and the long-term unemployed people. The report also investigates the rejection of applications (frequently, around 30% are rejected), the digitalisation of application processes (most common for unemployment benefits) and economic activation requirements (typically, 1–6% of benefit recipients annually are sanctioned for not complying with activity requirements) and service entitlements."

"Le système de redistribution français affiche des performances globalement satisfaisantes en comparaison d'autres pays européens. Toutefois, la complexité des prestations sous condition de ressource et le manque de coordination des acteurs pèsent sur les taux de recours et conduisent à des incohérences. En 2014, 8,8 millions de personnes vivaient en dessous du seuil de pauvreté monétaire fixé à 60 % du niveau de vie médian (1 008 euros par mois). Certaines catégories de foyers sont particulièrement touchées, notamment les jeunes et les familles monoparentales."

"En comparaison des autres pays européens, le taux de pauvreté est relativement modéré et stable en France, mais il est aussi très persistant. La pauvreté se « transmet » des parents aux enfants, du fait de sa concentration dans certains quartiers défavorisés, des plus grandes difficultés scolaires et de la difficile insertion professionnelle des peu ou pas diplômés. Pour enrayer la reproduction de la pauvreté, les auteurs de la Note, Stéphane Carcillo, Élise Huillery et Yannick L'Horty, recommandent de s'attaquer à ses déterminants."

"Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016 is the first of an annual flagship report that will inform a global audience comprising development practitioners, policy makers, researchers, advocates, and citizens in general with the latest and most accurate estimates on trends in global poverty and shared prosperity. This edition will also document trends in inequality and identify recent country experiences that have been successful in reducing inequalities, provide key lessons from those experiences, and synthesize the rigorous evidence on public policies that can shift inequality in a way that bolsters poverty reduction and shared prosperity in a sustainable manner. Specifically, the report will address the following questions: • What is the latest evidence on the levels and evolution of extreme poverty and shared prosperity? • Which countries and regions have been more successful in terms of progress toward the twin goals and which are lagging behind? • What does the global context of lower economic growth mean for achieving the twin goals? • How can inequality reduction contribute to achieving the twin goals? • What does the evidence show concerning global and between- and within-country inequality trends? • Which interventions and countries have used the most innovative approaches to achieving the twin goals through reductions in inequality? The report will make four main contributions. First, it will present the most recent numbers on poverty, shared prosperity, and inequality. Second, it will stress the importance of inequality reduction in ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity by 2030 in a context of weaker growth. Third, it will highlight the diversity of within-country inequality reduction experiences and will synthesize experiences of successful countries and policies, addressing the roots of inequality without compromising economic growth. In doing so, the report will shatter some myths and sharpen our knowledge of what works in reducing inequalities. Finally, it will also advocate for the need to expand and improve data collection—for example, data availability, comparability, and quality—and rigorous evidence on inequality impacts in order to deliver high-quality poverty and shared prosperity monitoring."

"This report presents the annual review of the Social Protection Committee on the development of social protection policies, including social inclusion, pension, health and long-term care, in the European Union. Focusing on policy measures adopted in the period 2013-2014, the report aims at assessing the main directions of reform efforts in the field of social protection. It is based on social reporting done by the Member States in the context of the National Social Reports. A thematic section is dedicated to youth exclusion as one of the foremost challenges to a social Europe arising from the economic crisis."

"This report shows that decent work is paramount in the fight to reduce poverty. One key finding is that poverty has tended to decline in many emerging and developing countries, whereas it has tended to increase in the majority of advanced economies, including in terms of working poverty.

The report also examines the role that policy can play, documenting country initiatives focused on job-centred economic policies, employment programmes, enterprise development, social protection and social dialogue.

Finally, the report discusses the role of international labour standards in reducing poverty and inequality."

"In this article we estimate counterfactual poverty rates in order to evaluate the impact of changes in taxation and benefits on the increase of the poverty risk rate in Finland between 1993 and 2010. Household disposable incomes are simulated by using the households from the 2010 data, but varying the annual taxation and benefits for the years 1993–2013. Benefit cuts after the 1990s depression had a rather modest impact on poverty risk rates but changes in taxation had a considerably larger impact. The poverty risk rate would be 2.5 percentage points lower if tax legislation was the same in 2010 as it was in 1993. Furthermore, the level of benefits has decreased compared to the average income level. If the level of benefits in 2010 had remained at the same level as in 1993 compared to average earnings, the poverty risk rate would be four percentage points lower in 2010. Our results show that the so-called policy drift with regard to social transfers can have a major impact on relative adequacy and on the poverty reduction effect of social transfers in the long-run. "