Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
a growth in long-term unemployment. Other
contributing factors were related to political
strategies that reduced expenditure on social
welfare. In many Western states, these trends are
reflected by a growing inequality in income
distribution. (Goodman
et al
. 1997).
A key factor in the debate over the nature and
extent of poverty and deprivation is the distinction
made between absolute and relative poverty. The
absolutist or subsistence definition of poverty
contends that a family would be considered to be
living in poverty if its 'total earnings are insufficient
to obtain the minimum necessaries for the
maintenance of merely physical efficiency'
(Rowntree 1901: p. 186).This notion of a minimum
level of subsistence and the related concept of a
poverty line exerted a strong influence on the
development of social welfare legislation in postwar
Britain. The system of National Assistance benefits
introduced following the Beveridge Report of
1942 was based on calculations of the amount
required to satisfy the basic needs of food, clothing
and housing plus a small amount for other expenses.
A similar concept of a safety net for particularly
vulnerable social groups underlies the Medicare and
Medicaid programmes in the USA. In general, most
estimates of the scale of poverty within and
between nations employ a per
capita
level of income
as a definitive poverty line.
If, however, we accept that needs are culturally
determined rather than biologically fixed then
poverty is more accurately seen as a relative
phenomenon. The broader definition inherent in
the concept of relative poverty includes job security,
work satisfaction, fringe benefits (such as pension
rights) plus various components of the 'social wage',
including the use of public property and services as
well as satisfaction of higher-order needs such as
status, power and self-esteem. In essence, the
absolutist perspective carries with it the implication
that poverty can be eliminated in an economically
advanced society, while the relativist view accepts
that the poor are always with us.
As Figure 29.1 indicates, poverty and
deprivation are related concepts. Poverty is a
central element in the multi-dimensional problem
of deprivation whereby individual difficulties
reinforce one another to produce a situation of
absolute disadvantage for those affected. The root
cause of deprivation is economic and stems from
two sources. The first arises due to the low wages
earned by those employed in declining traditional
industries or engaged, often on a part-time basis,
in newer service-based industries in post-
industrial societies, or by the mass of the self-
employed in the informal sector of third world
economies. The second cause is the
unemployment experienced by those marginal to
the job market such as single parents, the elderly,
disabled and, increasingly, never-employed school
leavers. Significantly, applied geographical research
has demonstrated that the complex of poverty-
related problems shown in Figure 29.1 exhibits
marked spatial concentration. This patterning
serves to accentuate the effects of poverty and
deprivation for the residents of particular localities.
The phenomenon of socio-spatial segregation is
seen at its starkest in the squatter settlements of
the third world (Plate 29.1) but is to be found to a
varying degree in most of the cities of the modern
world (Box 29.1).
In declining older industrial regions of the North
neighbourhood unemployment rates of three times
the national average are common, with male
unemployment frequently in excess of 40 per cent
Figure 29.1
The anatomy of multiple deprivation.
Source:
Pacione 1997b.
