Okrasa uses four-year panel data from Poland's gender were least likely to be poor. Poverty was Household Budget Survey to explore the distinction unaffected by the presence of a disabled person in the between transitory and long-term poverty, a crucial household. distinction in designing and evaluating poverty reduction * Households with liquid assets or durables, or with strategies.access to financial resources, were less likely to be poor Okrasa analyzes household welfare trajectories during and vulnerable. Households appeared to take advantage the period 1993-96, to identify the long-term poor and of credit and loans to maintain their current level of to determine how relevant household asset endowments consumption rather than to augment their stock of assets. are as determinants of household poverty and * Households that were part of kinship networks were vulnerability over time.less at risk of falling into chronic poverty or He concludes that the chronically poor constitute a vulnerability. distinct and separate segment of the population, with low * Households headed by pensioners were least in turnover. Among specific observations about factors that danger of impoverishment. Those most in danger were affect Poland's long-term poverty: farm households (including "mixed" households headed * Variables in human capital significantly affected the by workers with an agricultural holding) and households pattern of repeated poverty and vulnerability. Larger heavily dependent on social welfare.households tended to experience poverty and * Households of employees were better off than selfvulnerability, mostly because they contained more employed households when income-based measures of children or other dependents. Households with elderly poverty were used but not when consumption-based members and those headed by older people, by women measures were used. Neither group was significantly rather than men, and by educated people of either vulnerable.This paper -a product of Poverty and Human Resources, Development Research Groupis part of a larger effort in the group to study the dynamics of poverty and the effectiveness of the safety net. Copies of the paper are available free from the World Bank,
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In his famous book on a theory of justice, John Rawls argues that under some special conditions, referred to as an “original position,” people would unanimously choose as a principle of distributive justice, the principle of maximizing the welfare of the worst-off individual in the society. An experiment was conducted under conditions approximating Rawls's “veil of ignorance.” It was a replication of Frohlich, Oppenheimer, and Eavy's experiment, using Polish instead of American students. In accordance with Rawls's prediction, most of experimental groups in both samples reached the consensus. However, the chosen principle was not the Rawlsian principle of maximizing the floor income, but the principle of maximizing the average income with the floor constraint. Moreover, in individual rankings and choices, the principle of maximizing the average income with a floor constraint received the highest ranks, while the Rawlsian principle received the lowest ranks. Our interpretation of these results is that the notion of distributive justice should not be reduced to considering only the welfare of the poorest.
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