Poverty: Trends, Causes and Cures

Australian Journal of Social Issues, 2002

The present approach to welfare reform, as embodied in the Final Report of the Reference Group on Welfare Reform (2000). relies heavily on the rhetoric of 'mutual obligation' and 'welfare dependency' while placing little emphasis on original research and relevant data that might inform and support its reform agenda. In marked contrast are the research-driven policy processes aimed at the alleviation of child poverty that took place during the Hawke-Keating government in the late 1980s. In this paper we illustrate the value ofresearch in relation to two government strategies. the Family Allowance Supplement (FAS) and the Child Support Scheme (CSS), that were instrumental in bringing a significant number of children out of poverty. We suggest that any commitment to further the reduction of child poverty requires resources for ongoing research programs. Poverty Research and Social Policy-The Background Poverty research had its genesis in the work of churches and church based agencies in the early years of the 20th century. At this time the slum dweller, the homeless. the jobless. 'the poor', all began to attract the attention of Australian moral reformers. The historian Graeme Davison (~OOO). cites the Methodist layman. J Oswald Barnett and the Anglican priest. Gerard Kennedy Tucker. founder of the Brotherhood of St Laurence. as two early reformers who. in order to provide authority for their work among the slums of inner-city Melbourne. carried out social surveys. These surveys. intended more to arouse public indignation than to find out what was the 'existing state of the play'. were an important component of religious social action strategies. Davison maintains that much of the flavour of social Christianity persisted in social research even when it \vas brought out from under the aegis of the churches and charities and given a place in the halls ofacadel11e. At this time the emphasis was on

2010

This paper discusses whether or, not quantitative method should alone be used to inform policy intervention to tackle poverty. While doing so the issues of ontology, epistemology, validity, reliability and generalisability will be examined within two of the most important research approaches, i.e., quantitative and qualitative, to identify their merits and shortcomings.

2007

This paper represents an initial attempt to view the role that social experiments, in general, and the income maintenance experiments and the wor Wwelfare demonstrations, in particular, have played in the policy process through the lens provided by the knowledge utilization literature. In addition to suggesting that the decision to conduct a social experiment is rarely, if ever, made according to an essentially rational paradigm, this lens helps highlight the range of uses to which findings from social experiments can be put and the circumstances under which various types of uses are more or less likely.

2006

This paper adds a moral angle to a pluralist approach to development economics. Normative assumptions can be found in all the five main schools of thought that have analysed India’s rural labour markets (neoclassical, new institutionalist, Marxist political economy, formalised political economy, and feminist). The theorisations that are used by each have normative overtones. I define overtones and distinguish them from normative undertones (i.e. elements of meaning that have an affect component). Statistical regressions in this literature are used to illustrate the types of undertones that are present. The undertones tend to cause performative contradictions for authors who claim value neutrality. The various moral reasoning strategies available for meta-normative economic research do not offer easy solutions. However they convincingly support the case for mixed-methods research in development economics. Further research on normative overtones can be conducted using bridging discour...

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Hong Kong Economic Journal, 28 October 2015