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Poorest Countries (poorest + country)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences57%

Selected Abstracts

The Prospects for Foreign Debt Sustainability in Post-Completion-Point Countries: Implications of the HIPC-MDRI Framework

DEVELOPMENT POLICY REVIEW, Issue 2 2008
Jacinta Nwachukwu
The Enhanced HIPC Initiative was launched in 1999 to reduce the Net Present Value (NPV) of foreign debt of the world's poorest countries to a sustainable threshold of 150% of their exports. This article applies a simple growth-with-debt model to 16 post-completion-point HIPCs to assess whether this goal will be met by 2015. Its somewhat optimistic base-case projections suggest that participation in the current Enhanced HIPC-MDRI initiative will only reduce the NPV of their total external debt to 176% of exports by this date. Sensitivity tests which expose these countries to adverse exogenous shocks help draw attention to policies that could ensure that they do not again accumulate unsustainable debt levels. [source]

The Haiti Earthquake: a salutary lesson in (non) earthquake engineering

GEOLOGY TODAY, Issue 2 2010
Peter Styles
A devastating earthquake of magnitude 7 struck very close and almost beneath Port au Prince the capital of Haiti, the western half of the island of Hispaniola, early in the morning of Tuesday, 12 January 2010 (Fig. 1). While in absolute terms this was by no means the largest earthquake recorded this year globally, the death toll is around 230 000, making it one of the world's worst earthquakes in terms of casualties in recorded history, with almost uncountable economic loss to one of the poorest countries in the world. Figure 1. Intensity map of 2010 Haiti earthquake (Image: USGS). [source]

Poverty and deprivation among children in Eastern Europe and Central Asia

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE, Issue 3 2009
Leonardo Menchini
Although there is now a large body of literature on poverty in the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, there remains a dearth of comparative analysis of child poverty and wellbeing. This article uses household survey microdata for the period 2001,2003 to compare absolute poverty, relative poverty, material deprivation and participation in schooling among children in five countries: Albania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Russia and Tajikistan. The analysis shows that low absolute levels of household consumption are associated with other deprivation indicators and with children's participation in schooling. The article also highlights the usefulness of relative poverty measures that effectively identify children at risk of exclusion in even the poorest countries in the region. The article concludes by arguing that household consumption is a good indicator of child poverty and deprivation in the region, and that relative poverty measures should be more widely used in monitoring global targets for poverty reduction. [source]

Price of prosperity: economic development and biological conservation in China ()

JOURNAL OF APPLIED ECOLOGY, Issue 3 2009
Fangliang He
Summary 1In the past three decades China has experienced fundamental changes to its economy, which have transformed it from one of the poorest countries in the world to the third largest economic body. This gain in wealth has, however, been achieved at severe cost to the environment. 2I review the current state of environmental protection and examine the effectiveness of the existing nature reserves for biological conservation in China. 3Synthesis and applications. Proactive approaches to environmental management , including significant investment in science and technology, science-informed land-use policy making and international collaboration , are necessary for China to significantly slow down or reverse its current environmental problems. [source]

Food Security, Overweight, and Agricultural Research,A View from 2003

JOURNAL OF FOOD SCIENCE, Issue 1 2004
E. KENNEDY
ABSTRACT: Some of the poorest countries of the world are facing an apparent paradox. Food insecurity, undernutrition, and overweight exist side by side within the same country. Indeed, food-insecure households often contain an overweight member. Data from 11 mega-countries (countries with a population of more than 100 million) will be presented to illustrate the magnitude of the problem. These 11 countries represent more than 60% of the world's population. Agriculture is still a dominant industry. The links between food insecurity, nutritional status, and agriculture will be presented. [source]

The Other Side of the Coin: Knowledge, NGOs and EU Trade Policy

POLITICS, Issue 1 2008
Holly Jarman
Despite the persistent influence of business, non-profit interest groups promoting development for the world's poorest countries, environmental protection, public health and other issues are actively seeking to influence the European trade agenda. Presenting interview evidence from doctoral research on lobbying and trade policy in the European Union and United States, this article argues that within new forms of EU consultation, insider business associations and NGOs adopt similar lobbying strategies, but that this has done little to bridge the divide between their fundamental beliefs. [source]

Front and Back Covers, Volume 22, Number 4.

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 4 2006
August 200
Front and back cover caption, volume 22 issue 4 Front cover Destruction and fertility meet in this photograph of a swidden ('slash and burn') field cultivated by the Rmeet in highland Laos, illustrating Guido Sprenger's article in this issue. After the secondary forest has been burned from the plots, fresh rice stalks grow between charred stumps during the weeding season in June. A field hut, built each year on the newly cleared plot, can be seen in the background. The author's main informant, one of Takheung's village elders, waits for the author to catch up on the slippery paths. Although denigrated as unsustainable by governments and development agencies worldwide, and hotly debated by agricultural experts and policy-makers, swidden agriculture persists in mountainous areas where wet rice cultivation is difficult. Swiddening involves much more than mere subsistence, and anthropologists have been concerned for many decades with questions of its sustainability, as it forms a central focus for a way of life that integrates all aspects of community life, from economy to cosmology and the reproduction of social relations, including families and marriage ties, ritual and exchange, relations between humans and spirits and also identity. Guido Sprenger seeks to remind those with the power to make decisions over swidden agriculture of the importance of being well informed, as their decisions may radically influence an entire way of life. Back cover Islamic Charities Islamic charities are found all over the world and are mostly uncontroversial. Our back cover shows an appeal, with detachable banker's order form, for the orphan programme of the Beit Al-Khair ('house of charity') Society, a domestic charity in the United Arab Emirates launched in 1989. Almost every Islamic charity operates an orphan programme. Islamic charities have been subjected to close scrutiny, especially by the US Treasury, since 9/11, and are the subject of two books recently published by the university presses of Yale (by Matthew Levitt) and Cambridge (by J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins), which belong to the genre of counter-terrorism studies. Such studies emulate the methods of police investigators and financial regulators, making ample use of intelligence websites and newspaper reports and seeking to identify associative networks of culpable individuals and entities. The drawback of these studies is that they do scant justice to the positive aspects of Islamic charities and often attribute guilt by association, since charities blacklisted by the US Treasury have only limited rights of defence and appeal, though very few have been successfully prosecuted. Scrupulous social research, by contrast, tries to understand the words and deeds of charities and charity workers in the widest context. The social research published so far on Islamic charities has focused on their political aspects, including Western-Islamic relations, divisions among Muslims, and connections with opposition movements. In this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Jonathan Benthall, who has been studying Islamic charities for 13 years, turns his attention to analysing the special opportunities that international Islamic charities can take advantage of in majority Muslim countries. His article outlines the work of the British-based Islamic Relief in the north of Mali, one of the world's poorest countries, with the implicit suggestion that more in-depth residential ethnographic fieldwork in such settings could yield valuable insights. [source]