Abstract
The paper explores attitudes to chronic poverty in a cross-section of developed and developing countries contributing data to the World Values Survey Wave Three (1994–1998). The analysis finds a consistent belief among a majority of respondents that poverty is persistent. The paper also explores the factors influencing public attitudes to chronic poverty, and finds that interests, position, knowledge, and shared values relating to social justice, are important.
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Notes
Extreme poverty refers to individuals and households living below the food poverty line.
The Productive Safety Net Programme in Ethiopia allocated 75% to programme expenditure to support households in poverty but with work capacity; and 25% to households in poverty without work capacity. This reflects government concern to minimise the chances that support will generate dependency. Governments in low income countries that focus resources on supporting the moderately (or transient) poor as a means to move closer to the MDG1 poverty reduction target implicitly assume that public attitudes do not discriminate between extreme/chronic and moderate/transient poverty.
We have adjusted the WVS3 by dropping Taiwan and Puerto Rico. We further combined samples for Serbia and Montenegro, samples for Tambov and Russia; samples for Andalusia, Galicia, Valencia and the Basque Country (Spain); samples for Republika Srpska and Bosnia; and finally samples for East and West Germany. This leaves us with data for 49 countries.
The European Union conducted a recent regional study of attitudes to poverty and exclusion (European Commission 2007b). We examined regional attitudinal surveys, the Latinobarometer and Afrobarometer, but the rounds currently available do not include direct questions on attitudes to poverty which could be analysed on a comparative basis.
As noted in the Introduction, to our knowledge, there is no available literature on attitudes to chronic poverty in a cross-section of developed and developing countries.
See Annex 1 for a detailed description of the relevant questions.
Hayati and Karami (2005) find that their sample of Iranian farmers is similarly split between those who subscribe to structural, individualistic and fatalistic causes of poverty. They also find that individualistic responses could be mapped onto groups with more assets, while fatalistic views are more often held by those with lowest socio-economic status. Respondents emphasising structuralist causes were in between these two categories.
Many studies have challenged the emphasis on single-cause explanations of poverty; see Verkuyten and Hunt cited in Harper (2001).
In a cross-cultural study Alesina and Angeletos (2005) compared the attitudes of US citizens to those of Western European citizens, using the World Value Survey. The authors conclude that the vast majority of the Americans (71%) but only 40% of the Europeans agreed with the proposition ‘The poor could become rich if they worked hard enough’.
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (http://www.chronicpoverty.org). We thank Jann Lay, Hisako Nomura and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments; the errors that remain are ours.
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Barrientos, A., Neff, D. Attitudes to Chronic Poverty in the ‘Global Village’. Soc Indic Res 100, 101–114 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-010-9606-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-010-9606-7