Persistent Poverty and Upward Mobility

Institute for the Social Sciences Theme Project Capstone Lecture

Chris BarrettApril 6, 2011

Persistent poverty over the past generation:• no fall in poverty rates in OECD countries • number of poor in World/ Latin America/ Africa has grown• Increasing belief and evidence that there exist “poverty traps”

The empirical conundrum

But also unprecedented upward mobility:• 750 mn fewer East Asians live on <$1/day • sharp fall in poverty rate in South Asia• half the world has become “middle class”, with all regions’ populations in the $2-13/day range growing• Non-money metric indicators (life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, etc.) nearly universally better

… Globalization and “great escape” from mass poverty

How to reconcile these seemingly divergent facts?

The empirical conundrum

What explains the divergent experiences of different sub-populations – differentiated by education, family status, geography, health, sociopolitical institutions, etc. – and the co-existence of chronic poverty and prosperity?

Why do some people remain poor for long periods of time? And what enables others to escape poverty?

What mechanisms drive some people into persistent poverty and how do others avoid it?

Core research questions

What linkages exist across spatial and temporal scales that reinforce persistent poverty?

Why different patterns for different indicators of well-being? What does this imply for policy?

What interventions intended to promote upward mobility and the escape from persistent poverty prove effective, for whom, and why (or why not)?

Which seemingly-effective interventions are politically, culturally and economically feasible, where and why?

Core research questions

These questions pose deep methodological challenges that often preoccupied our team:

1)Human agency – by the poor, policymakers, project implementers, etc. – complicates causal inference using observational data.

2)There are strong theoretical reasons to anticipate essential heterogeneity among distinct subpopulations, limiting the value of experimental studies.

3)Strong desire to establish generalizable results raises questions about the external validity of findings: is “radical skepticism” a viable approach if the purpose of our research is to inform action to reduce poverty?

Methodological challenges

Methodological challenges (continued):

4)Interest in intertemporal, population-level phenomena limits usefulness of short duration studies from non-representative samples.

5)High quality longitudinal data to study poverty dynamics are scarce and necessarily represent different populations over time.

6)Concepts and measurement of poverty and mobility are contested; reconciling these can be difficult at best.

Methodological challenges

Theme project team

The 2008-11 Theme Project Team

Theme project team

Chris Anderson, Government: Examining political causes and consequence of income redistribution, as well as the connection between political institutions and public policies and people’s employment choices, both in OECD countries.

Susan Christopherson, City and Regional Planning: Studying intra-regional labor market inequality and regional resilience in urban industrial areas of the eastern US.

Nic van de Walle, Government: Exploring the relationship between political clientelism and democracy in Africa and beyond, emphasizing the impact of democratization on service provision and on redistributive clientelism.

Theme project team

Matt Freedman, Labor Economics: Investigating the role of spatial mismatch and job accessibility in driving local labor market dynamics and contributing to poverty concentration and persistence in the US.

Jordan Matsudaira, Policy Analysis and Mgmt: Studying the impact of redistributive government inter-ventions on employers and employees, as well as why, despite steeply increasing returns to education in recent decades, high school graduation rates have stagnated in US.

David Sahn, Nutritional Sciences/Economics: Estimating dynamic models of human capital formation to better understand how to enhance health and cognitive abilities during the life course and across generations, especially among the ex ante poor in Africa.

Theme project team

Christine Olson, Nutritional Sciences: Exploring the relationship between being born into a low income house-hold and body weight in adolescence and the dynamics of food insecurity and hunger in the US.

Dan Lichter, Policy Analysis & Mgmt/Sociology: Investigating how unstable family patterns reflect and reinforce persistent poverty and economic inequality, and limit upward social mobility, as well as reproduce across generations.

Steve Morgan, Sociology: Exploring the effects of various financial aid policies on college entry in the US and the determinants of low educational attainment in sub-Saharan Africa.

Helped establish an intellectual community

Huge interest: 204 total affiliates, far more than any other ISS theme project (2nd has 140). More in every category of member (undergrad, grad students, alumni, community, staff, post-docs) except faculty.

Stimulate cross-campus, cross-disciplinary dialogues and collaborations around the research questions – empirical, methodological and theoretical – that motivated this theme project.

Unprecedented bridging of the domestic and international poverty research communities on campus.

What did we do?

Hosted a wide range of exciting events(plus several co-sponsored events)

Extremely popular weekly seminar series 30 presentations over the course of 2009-10. Emphasized presentations by team members and by younger rising stars such as: Anna Aizer (Brown), Chris Blattman (Yale), Seema Jayachandran (Stanford), Karen Jusko (Stanford), David McKenzie (World Bank), Pat Sharkey (NYU), etc.

What did we do?

2 University Lectures

Sep. 17, 2009: Elinor Ostrom (Indiana)

"Collective Action and the Commons:

What Have We Learned? "

1

Mar. 17, 2010: William Julius Wilson

(Harvard)

"More Than Just Race: Being Black

and Poor in the Inner City"

What did we do?

Conferences/workshopsSep. 9: The Future of US Poverty Policy and Research

Featured presentations by Ron Haskins (Brookings),Tim Smeeding (Wisconsin)and Rich Burkhauser (Cornell)

Oct. 13: Current Frontiers in the Study of Economic Mobility in Developing Countries

Featuring presentations by Michael Carter(UC-Davis), Jean-Yves Duclos (Laval), Paul Glewwe (Minnesota) and Martin Ravallion (World Bank)

What did we do?

Conferences/workshops (continued)

Nov. 16-17: Institutions, Behavior and the Escape from

Persistent Poverty 15 selected papers from a range of disciplines, countries, institutions, using a range of data and methods. Plus keynote talks by Phil Keefer (World Bank), Anirudh

Krishna (Duke) and Ruth Meinzen-Dick (IFPRI)

What did we do?

What did we do?

Conferences/workshops

Feb 11: Moving Out of Poverty: The Economic and Environmental Impacts of Programs Aimed

at Mitigating Spatial Mismatch Featuring presentations by Evelyn Blumenberg (UCLA),

Harry Holzer (Georgetown), Julia Lane (NSF), Steven Raphael (UC- Berkeley), Brian Taylor (UCLA)

What did we do?

Conferences/workshops

May 12-13, 2010: Human Capital Interventions: Targeting Poor Children Early in Life Featuring presentations by Zulfiqar Bhutta (Aga Khan

Univ.), Maureen Black (Maryland), John Eckenrode (Cornell),

Rey Martorell (Emory), David Sahn (Cornell), Gretel Pelto and

Jean-Pierre Habicht (Cornell) and Jim Riccio (MDRC)

Teaching

Most popular ISS theme project to date as reflected in student affiliates of the project

Introduced a very popular, well-reviewed team-taught course, cross-listed among AEM, CRP and Sociology: Comparative Perspectives in Poverty Reduction Policy

18 different courses taught 25 times by team members.

Made 10 student research grants (1 undergrad, 9 grad) – Anthropology, Applied Econ & Mgmt, Dev’t Sociology, Economics, Government, Sociology – and held a student research poster symposium April 27, 2010.

What did we do?

Outreach

At least 13 different public outreach presentations to non-academic audiences, locally (e.g., Catholic Charities of Tompkins and Tioga) and nationally (e.g., Congress).

Most popular ISS theme project to date in engaging affiliates outside of Cornell: community organizations locally, nationally and internationally. (Indeed, had to create a new Alumni & Retirees category for affiliates for our project!)

What did we do?

Research productivityThe ten core team members have been exceptionally productive. Over ~ 2.5 years, these 10 scholars have:

Attracted more than $5.7 million in external grants in at least 21 different awards, from Heinz Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, NSF, Park Foundation, USAID, USDA, etc.

At least 92 different articles, books or book chapters published, appearing in a wide range of leading journals and publishers.

Laid the groundwork for major future collaborative grant proposals and research projects.

What did we do?

The core purposes and accomplishments of the theme project revolve around:

Team accomplishments

Enhancing Cornell’s Visibility-expose leading lights (both established and rising stars) to Cornell and Cornell to leading lights -help define and project a Cornell brand of deeply empirical, methodologically heterodox poverty and inequality research, building on longstanding excellence and emergent lines of inquiry.

-Cornell’s niche: bridging theory and application.

Learning

- a cohort of students exposed to a broad group of scholars from Cornell and elsewhere.

- extraordinary opportunity for faculty learning, especially across audiences and literatures: - domestic-international

- disciplines- spatial scales of analysis

- help project Cornell findings to broader audiences

Team accomplishments

Huge student, staff and faculty interest- Poverty and inequality studies deeply popular today.

- Deeply embedded in Cornell’s history, dating to 1865 original aim to facilitate the transformation of a fundamentally agrarian society emerging from socio political upheaval and grappling with rapid technological, institutional and economic change.

- Cornell has extraordinary depth, breadth and potential in this area of scholarship, instruction and outreach.

- Abundance of riches within disciplines, but limited capacity for students to bridge them.

Lessons Learned

So what are the big lessons learned from this project?

Sustaining interdisciplinary work is tough

- Structural incentives of Departments, Schools and Colleges are largely centrifugal, especially given relatively small size of Cornell social sciences.

- Limited coordination mechanisms across units. ISS plays a valuable role, but necessarily of short duration for thematic efforts such as this one.

- Difficult to get faculty out of routines in order to devote substantial time to new collaborations in a single residence year. Reflects both inertia effects and the independent nature of much contemporary social science research.

Lessons Learned

Hard to bridge the high-low income country divide

- Language and thematic foci differ (e.g., educational issues, food security issues)

- Amount, type and quality of data varies enormously

- Limited transferability of specific policy knowledge. Perspectives and perhaps models may be portable, but it takes real work. Few intellectual arbitrage opportunities.

- Context matters enormously, so generalizations are difficult but essential (Opportunity NYC – Oportunidades).

Lessons Learned

Outreach and teaching are essential

- Reducing persistent poverty and enhancing upward mobility ultimately turn on political and institutional constraints – at local, national and global levels – to addressing these challenges.

- Narrowly-focused academic policy research is an input, but must ultimately help inform more broad-based action that depends heavily on research informing instruction on campus and off.

Lessons Learned

Thank you –especially to Ken, Anneliese and Judi – for your interest and support these past three years!

For more info

For more information visit the project web site:http://www.socialsciences.cornell.edu/0811/