The Nexus between the Leadership Question and the Poverty Trap in Africa
This paper examines the nexus between leadership question and the increasingly persistent poverty incidence in Africa, taking into consideration the effects of globalization. It argues that the dearth of an authentic knowledge leadership that is infused with patriotism, conscience, knowledge and transformational interest with Africa as centre of its foreign policies has been the bane of socio-economic development in Africa. The paper investigates this submission by examining the issues of how Africa got into the poverty trap, the leadership challenges in relation to globalization and poverty trap. It suggests how the challenges could effect a transformation out of this poverty trap. The development of knowledge leadership, Afro-centric foreign policies, diversification of the economy, industrial entrepreneurship revolution and internal generation of development funds are some of the recommendations out of this poverty trap.
Chronic Poverty: Some policy implications
Andrew Shepherd suggests that there is an inter-disciplinary meeting point between concepts of ‘poverty traps’ and ‘adverse incorporation’, and suggests that the cutting edge of research on chronic poverty lies in the interaction of asset dynamics, insecurity and changing social relations. The performance of the state, and, in particular, the under-performance of the state in chronically deprived countries is a critical constraint on the eradication of poverty.
RAGS TO RAGS: Poverty and Mobility in the United States
Early arguments over the “culture of poverty” assumed considerable intergenerational transmission of poverty but differed over whether this was due to cultural inadequacies of the poor or to structural barriers and discrimination faced by the poor. These arguments subsided by the 1970s when quantitative social stratification studies such as Blau & Duncan (1967) found that intergenerational socioeconomic mobility was considerable and that there was little evidence for a “vicious cycle of poverty.” In the 1980s the issue of intergenerational poverty reemerged when research on new longitudinal datasets suggested that both intragenerational and intergenerational poverty were more persistent than analyses based on cross-sectional data had suggested. Four new theoretical perspectives were developed to explain intergenerational poverty: the resources model, the correlated disadvantages model, the welfare culture model, and Wilson’s (1987) underclass model. This review summarizes and evaluates recent empirical re...