Poverty and Inequality in Middle Income Countries : Policy Achievements, Political Obstacles

This collection offers a timely reassessment of viable ways of addressing poverty across the globe today. The profile of global poverty has changed dramatically over the past decade, and around three-quarters of the poor now live in middle income countries, making inequality a major issue. This requires us to fundamentally rethink anti-poverty strategies and policies, as many aspects of the established framework for poverty reduction are no longer effective. Featuring contributions from Latin America, Africa and Asia, this much-needed collection answers some of the key questions arising as development policy confronts the challenges of poverty and inequality on the global, national and local scale in both urban and rural contexts.

Providing poverty researchers and practitioners with valuable new tools to address new forms of poverty in the right way, Poverty and Inequality in Middle Income Countries shows how a radical switch from aid to redistribution-based social policies is needed to combat new forms of global poverty.

Einar Braathen is senior researcher in international studies at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research (NIBR). A political scientist, he has specialized in governance and policy analysis in the global South, particularly the linkages between multi-level governance (central-local relations, municipality-community relations) and policy delivery (poverty reduction, service delivery, climate change adaptation). He worked as the coordinator of the CROP programme on The Role of the State in Poverty reduction, 1997-2000. For the last 10 years he has mainly worked on two BRICS countries, South Africa and Brazil, and he has lived in Rio de Janeiro for longer periods. He was the project leader of Cities against poverty: Brazilian experiences (2010-13) funded by the Research Council of Norway and the leader of the work package 'Politics and policies to address urban inequality' in the EU/FP/ funded project Urban Chances - City Growth and the Sustainability Challenge (2010-2014). He is the editor of the website www.nibrinternational.no/Brazilian_Urban_Politics.

Julian May is the Director of the Institute for Social Development and Chairperson of the Community Law Centre at the University of the Western Cape and the NRF funded South African Research Chair in Applied Poverty Assessment. He is a Research Associate at the Brooks World Poverty Institute, the International Food Policy Research Institute, the Department of Social Policy, Oxford University and the South African Labour and Development Research Unit at the University of Cape Town.

Gemma C. Wright is a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute of Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford and Deputy Director of the Centre for the Analysis of South African Social Policy. She is a Research Associate at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University (RSA) and Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for International Education, University of Sussex. Her areas of interest include the definition and measurement of poverty, child poverty, small area level analysis of deprivation, and social security policy including tax and benefit microsimulation.

THOMAS POGGE received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University, He has published widely on Kant and in moral and political philosophy, including various books on Rawls and global justice. He is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and Professorial Fellow at the ANU Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. He is also editor for social and political philosophy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science.

Thomas Pogge is Leitner professor of philosophy and international affairs at Yale University.