Publication Details
Assets or income?
Longitudinal perspectives on urban chronic poverty reduction
Caroline Moser
2010
Abstract
This paper highlights the importance of complementing macrolevel income poverty trend data with micro-level longitudinal studies that demonstrate the importance of asset accumulation strategies adopted by households as mechanisms of upward income mobility. Research findings from a thirty-year study of `Ordinary Families, Extraordinary Lives’ in an urban squatter community in Guayaquil, Ecuador show how households relentless and systematically fought to accumulate human, social, physical capital within a changing political, economic and spatial context. For their children poverty levels may be lower, but increasing inequalities, and exclusion from real job opportunities, translate into a different set of accumulation options that include transnational migration, or increasing involvement in drugs and crime, with associated violence.
Publication Type(s)
Conference Paper
Ten Years of War Against Poverty Conference Papers
Conference: Ten Years of War Against Poverty