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Braids personal narratives, city politics, and national history to tell the timely and epic story of Chicago's Cabrini-Green, America's most iconic public housing project. Built in the 1940s atop an infamous Italian slum, Cabrini-Green grew to twenty-three towers and a population of 20,000--all of it packed onto just seventy acres a few blocks from Chicago's ritzy Gold Coast. Cabrini-Green became synonymous with crime, squalor, and the failure of government. For the many who lived there, it was also a much-needed resource--it was home. By 2011, every high-rise had been razed, the island of black poverty engulfed by the white affluence around it, the families dispersed. In this novelistic and eye-opening narrative, Ben Austen tells the story of America's public housing experiment and the changing fortunes of American cities. It is an account told movingly through the lives of residents who struggled to make a home for their families as powerful forces converged to accelerate the housing complex's demise. Beautifully written, rich in detail, and full of moving portraits, High-Risers is a sweeping exploration of race, class, popular culture, and politics in modern America that brilliantly considers what went wrong in our nation's effort to provide affordable housing to the poor--and what we can learn from those mistakes.

Economists have long sought to predict how macroeconomic shocks will affect individual welfare. Macroeconomic data and forecasts are easily available when crises strike. But policy action requires not only understanding the magnitude of a macro shock, but also identifying which households or individuals are being hurt by (or benefit from) the crisis. Moreover, in many cases, impacts on the ground might be already occurring as macro developments become known, while micro level evidence is still unavailable because of paucity of data. Because of these reasons, a comprehensive real-time understanding of how the aggregate changes will translate to impacts at the micro level remains elusive. This problem is particularly acute when dealing with developing countries where household data is sporadic or out of date. This volume outlines a more comprehensive approach to the problem, showcasing a micro simulation model, developed in response to demand from World Bank staff working in countries and country governments in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008-09. During the growing catastrophe in a few industrialized countries, there was rising concern about how the crisis would affect the developing world and how to respond to it through public policies. World Bank staff s was scrambling to help countries design such policies; this in turn required information on which groups of the population, sectors and regions the crisis would likely affect and to what extent. The volume is organized as follows. Chapter 1 summarizes the methodology underlying the micro simulation model to predict distributional impacts of the crisis, along with several case studies that highlight how the model can be used in different country contexts. Chapters 2 to 4 are written by experts external to the Bank, two of whom participated as discussants at a workshop on the micro simulation work organized in May, 2010 at the World Bank headquarters. Chapter 2 comments on the broader implications and shortcomings of applying the technique described in Chapter 1 and the ability or willingness of governments to respond adequately to its results. Chapter 3 draws parallels between the United States and developing countries to discuss the lessons that can be learned for mitigating the impacts of future crises. Chapter 4 discusses how the micro simulation approach can be sharpened to make it a better tool for distributional analysis moving forward.

Contents: Poverty and the response to the economic crisis in Liberia. brief overview -- Poverty and human development diagnostic -- Poverty in Liberia. level, profile and determinants -- Education in Liberia. basic diagnostic using the 2007 CWIQ survey -- Health in Liberia. basic diagnostic using the 2007 CWIQ survey -- Impact of higher food prices and fiscal measures taken to respond to the crisis -- Rice prices and poverty in Liberia -- Benefit incidence of fiscal measures to deal with the impact on households of the economic crisis in Liberia. comparing import and income taxes -- Evaluation of the cash for work temporary employment program -- Ex ante assessment of the potential impact of labor intensive public works in Liberia -- Liberia's cash for work temporary employment project. responding to crisis in low income, fragile countries -- Impact of labor intensive public works in Liberia. results from a light evaluation survey -- List of tables, figures, and boxes.

Understanding Changes in Poverty brings together different methods to decompose the contributions to poverty reduction. A simple approach quantifies the contribution of changes in demographics, employment, earnings, public transfers, and remittances to poverty reduction. A more complex approach quantifies the contributions to poverty reduction from changes in individual and household characteristics, including changes in the sectoral, occupational, and educational structure of the workforce, as well as changes in the returns to individual and household characteristics. Understanding Changes in Poverty implements these approaches and finds that labor income growththat is, growth in income per worker rather than an increase in the number of employed workerswas the largest contributor to moderate poverty reduction in 21 countries experiencing substantial reductions in poverty over the past decade. Changes in demographics, public transfers, and remittances helped, but made relatively smaller contributions to poverty reduction. Further decompositions in three countries find that labor income grew mainly because of higher returns to human capital endowments, signaling increases in productivity, higher relative price of labor, or both. Understanding Changes in Poverty will be of particular relevance to development practitioners interested in better understanding distributional changes over time. The methods and tools presented in this book can also be applied to better understand changes in inequality or any other distributional change.

Over the past century, the world has seen a sustained decline in the proportion of people living in poverty, but climate change could challenge poverty reduction efforts. On the Poverty and Welfare Impacts of Climate Change: Quantifying the Effects, Identifying the Adaptation Strategies surveys the relevant research on how climate change may affect global poverty rates and presents country-specific studies with implications for low-income rural populations as well as governments' risk management programs.An evidence review examines three main strands of the literature. Unsurprisingly, the impacts of climate change are shown to be generally regressive-falling more heavily on the poor than on the rich. However, most estimates have tended to ignore the effect of aggregate economic growth on poverty and household welfare. With continued growth, the evidence suggests that the poverty impact will be relatively modest and will not reverse the major decline in poverty expected over the next 40 years. Sector-specific studies-focusing on how climate change may affect agricultural yields-are generally poor predictors of national-level poverty impacts because of heterogeneity in the ability of households to adapt. That heterogeneity features prominently in studies of how weather shocks affect rural households in Indonesia and Mexico. Erratic deviations from long-term weather patterns affect growing cycles and thereby rural households' consumption (per capita expenditure) and health indicators. In Indonesia, the affected households appeared able to protect food expenditures at the expense of nonfood expenditures, and their access to credit and community public-works projects had the strongest moderating effects. In Mexico, weather shocks affected both food and nonfood consumption in ways that varied by both region and timing. The affected households' ability to smooth consumption depended on factors including proximity to bus stations. In some regions, weather shocks also had measurable stunting effects on the stature of children between 12 and 47 months of age, perhaps from changes in household income, increases in communicable diseases, or both. Overall, more region-specific analyses within more finely tuned climate categories will help researchers to better estimate the effects of climate change on poverty and the effectiveness of government-level strategies to address those effects.This book will be of interest to academics, and decision makers in government and nongovernmental organizations, seeking to design climate-smart poverty alleviation and safety net programs based on evidence.

Following the 1998 financial crisis, four out of every ten people slipped into poverty, not able to meet basic needs. Luckily, post-crisis economic rebound was impressive and broad-based ? albeit uneven ? across sectors and regions. This title explores the nature of poverty, both nationally and regionally, to identify the groups with a high poverty risk. It then examines growth-poverty linkages through the labor market, as well as the contribution of growth and inequality to the recent poverty reduction. It also considers the expected impact of WTO accession on overall growth and poverty. Finally, it focuses on the scope for improving social policy in ways that will have a direct impact on the poor.

The Sourcebook introduces a framework for social analysis in Poverty and Social Impact Analysis along with a set of practical tools that address the institutional, political, and social dimensions of policy design and implementation and how these impact poverty and distributional equity. It is designed for country practitioners working in policy analysis in a range of areas, including macroeconomic, sectoral, and public sector policy.

Private sustainability standards are increasingly important in food trade with developing countries, but the implications for smallholder farmers are still poorly understood. We analyze the implications of different coffee certification schemes in Ethiopia using cross-sectional survey data, and regression and propensity-score-matching techniques. We find that: Rainforest Alliance (RA) and double Fairtrade-Organic (FT-Org) certifications are associated with higher incomes and reduced poverty, mainly because of higher prices; Fairtrade (FT) certification hardly affects welfare; and Organic (Org) certification reduces incomes, chiefly due to lower yields. Cooperative heterogeneity importantly shapes these results. Results imply that private standards may not always deliver what they promise to consumers.

This book contributes to the debate about the role of agriculture in poverty reduction by addressing three sets of questions:Does investing in agriculture enhance/harm overall economic growth, and if so, under what conditions? Do poor people tend to participate more/less in growth in agriculture than in growth in other sectors, and if so, when? If a focus on agriculture would tend to yield larger participation by the poor, but slower overall growth, which strategy would tend to have the largest payoff in terms of poverty reduction, and under which conditions?.

Poor people derive most of their income from work; however, there is insufficient understanding of the role of employment and earnings as a linkage between growth and poverty reduction, especially in low income countries. With the objective of providing inputs into the policy discussion on how to enhance poverty reduction through increased employment and earnings for given growth levels, this study explores this linkage in the case of Madagascar using data from the national accounts and household surveys from the years 1999, 2001, and 2005, a period characterized among others by a short but severe crisis which started at the end of 2001 and the subsequent economic rebound. This report is part of a series of studies conducted in the context of the World Bank’s research framework aiming to improve the understanding of the linkages among growth, labor, and poverty reduction.