I imagine most of my readers have never heard of Dauphin, Manitoba. A small, farming community in Canada, Dauphin is a town that was part of an experiment back in the 1970s. The "mincome" project was launched in 1974, and offered everyone a minimum income. Unfortunately, the project was shut down in 1979 with a change in the government, and so the effects weren't long term enough. The purpose of the mincome project was to see what would happen if a "top up" was offered to everyone. Dr. Evelyn Forget has been studying records from those years, and following up on people to see how it impacted their life. Would people stop working? Would there be higher rates of employment? How would people respond?
But lets start from the top. What is a minimum income? Currently, there are two main models for a minimum income – the universal basic income (UBI), and the negative income tax (NIT). They're similar, but also slightly different in how they're implemented. A negative income tax basically gives you money to top you up to a certain among, after which point you start getting taxed. However, this has problems, such as how often would your income be evaluated? If it was only annually, then someone could be unemployed for a year or more before they receive their minimum income payments. More frequently would be better, but would also be more challenging to implement. The other alternative is a universal basic income, which gives every adult a monthly cheque regardless of income. At the end of the year, this would be included in taxable income. This is also problematic: primarily because of the high costs up front, plus the optics of giving everyone a cheque, including those who do not need it.
The number of people living in poverty in Ghana halved between 1992 and 2013, the government said Friday, with the country meeting a key developmental benchmark even as its economy struggles.
Just under a quarter, or 24.2 percent, of Ghanaians were living in poverty in 2013 compared to 51.7 percent in 1992, new data from the national statistics body showed.
The figures were based on Ghana's own measure of poverty which for 2013 counted individuals living on less than 3.60 cedis -- equivalent last year to an average of $2.34 or 2.21 euros -- a day.
The UN measure for poverty counts those living on an even smaller amount, of less than $1.25 per day.
By halving the poverty rate, Ghana becomes one of the few African countries to achieve the first of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, a set of benchmarks that developing countries are aiming to meet by next year.
A program designed to move families out of high-poverty neighborhoods resulted in reduced rates of depression and conduct disorder among girls, but increased rates of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and conduct disorder among boys, according to a study published in the March 5 issue of JAMA.
Prof. Jens Ludwig, one of the study's authors, said this was a follow-up long-term analysis of families participating in the Moving to Opportunity residential-mobility demonstration sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Ludwig is the McCormick Foundation Professor of Social Service Administration, Law, and Public Policy at the University of Chicago; director of the UChicago Crime Lab; and co-director of the University of Chicago Urban Education Lab.
"The major surprise was the size of the findings," Ludwig said. "Moving out of high-poverty areas had very different effects on boys and girls, and both effects are large. For boys, the increase in PTSD is comparable to what you see from combat exposure among military veterans, while the reduction in depression among girls is equally massive."
Moving to Opportunity was designed to use housing vouchers to move families out of very distressed public housing projects into less disadvantaged neighborhoods with lower poverty and crime rates, with the goal of improving educational achievement and economic self-sufficiency. Between 1994 and 1998 the HUD program enrolled 4,604 volunteer low-income public housing families in five cities (Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York) and randomly assigned some but not others to receive housing vouchers.
The follow-up evaluations were conducted 10 to 15 years later, which meant participants who were in early childhood at the time of the randomization were in adolescence when researchers were evaluating long-term associations of the housing mobility program with mental disorders. Ludwig's co-researchers on the study include lead author Ronald C. Kessler from Harvard Medical School as well as other colleagues from Harvard, University of California-Irvine, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Congressional Budget Office.
The researchers found that girls whose families had the chance to move through Moving to Opportunity had much lower rates of major depression compared to the control group (6.5 percent versus 10.9 percent) and conduct disorder (0.3 percent versus 2.9 percent). On the other hand, boys whose families had the chance to move through Moving to Opportunity had significantly elevated rates of major depression (7.1 percent vs. 3.5 percent) and elevated rates of PTSD (6.2 percent versus 1.9 percent, respectively) and conduct disorder (6.4 percent vs. 2.1 percent).
