Poverty Profile Term Paper

Poverty Profile Term Paper
Assignment Instructions

Paper specifications:

8-10 page paper, exclusive of reference page and/or tables (this means you must be concise).
In accordance with APA Style (6th Edition). Please use resources provided through this course space or the WSU library to verify citation, reference, formatting, and stylistic guidelines.
A minimum of 8 references are required; better papers use a variety of sources and have more than the minimum. A well written paper will draw from web-based resources, technical reports, books, and research articles.

FIRST you need to choose one nation from the list below for your poverty profile:

(You may want to avoid Socialist Countries as locating information on them can be difficult)

Africa
Angola
Botswana
Cameroon
Cot d’Ivoire
Egypt
Ethiopia
Ghana
Kenya
Madagascar
Malawi
Morocco
Mozambique
Namibia
Nigeria
Rwanda
Sierra Leone
Senegal
South Africa
Tanzania
Tunisia
Uganda
Zaire
Zambia
Zimbabwe

Middle East
Afghanistan
Bahrain
Egypt**
Iran
Iraq
Jordan
Lebanon
Oman
Palestine
Syria
Yemen

Latin America
Argentina
Belize
Bolivia
Brazil
Chile
Columbia
Costa Rica
Cuba
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
El Salvador
Guatemala
Guyana
Haiti
Honduras
Jamaica
Mexico
Nicaragua
Panama
Paraguay
Peru
Suriname
Uruguay
Venezuela

East and South East Asia
Burma
Cambodia
Indonesia
Laos
Malaysia
Philippines
Thailand
Vietnam

** Egypt is geographically located in the continent of Africa. I have included it as part of the Middle East because of its proximity and socio-cultural similarity to Middle-Eastern nation.

Your paper MUST address the following information and include each of the following 6 headings in your paper.

Cultural background (5 points)
Briefly describe their nationalities, language, and religion.
Discuss some of their unique customs they practice.
Historical/political context (5 points)
Provide a brief history of the country (at least 4 major events)
What type of government system is in place?
Is there currently or has there recently been social unrest (war)?
Sources and distribution of wealth (5 points)
What are their: natural, technological, and human resources?
What is the distribution of labor force by occupation?
How is the wealth in this nation distributed? (for example, what percentage of the wealthy population own the country’s income? Wealth Gap?)
Economic and non-economic indicators of well-being (20 points)
List and describe 6 economic measures of well-being for your country (you must include the concepts from Sumner’s article).
List and describe 6 non-economic measures of well-being for your country (you must include the concepts from Sumner’s article).
What do the stats tell us about the living conditions in this country?
What pieces of the picture might be missing with these data?
Are their differences by gender, age, geographic location?
Why are there such differences?

You must include Sumner’s (2006) article as a guide for what indicators you should use in your analysis. Table 3.2 provides a list of the most commonly used economic indicators of well-being. Tables 3.3 and 3.4 provide information on commonly used non-economic indicators of poverty in a nation.

You will need to pick 6 indicators from each Table:

Table 3.2 Most commonly used economic measures of well-being

Income per capita
– GDP per capita
– Real wages
– Unemployment rate*

Income poverty lines
– Percentage of the population living under a dollar-a-day per capita*
– Percentage of the population living under the national poverty line (2,100 calories)
– Percentage of the population vulnerable to poverty through variance of income or assets

Income inequality
– Poverty gap and severity indices at a dollar-a-day per capita*
– Expenditure of bottom quintile as percentage of total expenditure*
– Gini coefficient

* Indicator is an MDG.

Table 3.3 Most commonly used non-economic measures of well-being

Education
– Education enrolment rates*
– Survival to the final primary or secondary school grade completion of primary or secondary school*
– Literacy rates*

Health and nutrition
– Malnutrition rates*/food or calorie consumption per capital body mass index
– Mortality and morbidity rates*/life expectancy not expected to survive to 40years/infection rates*
– Health service usage – skilled personnel at birth*/contraceptive prevalence rate*/immunization rates*

Environment
– Access to “improved” water sources*
– Access to “adequate” sanitation*
– Household infrastructure – permanent material used for walls of home an electricity supply

Empowerment and participation (tentative)
– Participation in general and local election voting (decision-making at various levels)
– Extent of knowledge of local projects and district budgets (access to information)
– Number, size and revenue of active NGOs (potential for civil society monitoring)

* Indicator is an MDG.

Reference: Sumner, A. (2006). Economic well-being and non-economic well-being. In M. McGillivray & M. Clarke (Eds.), Understanding human well-being (pp. 54-73). NY: United Nations University Press.

As you begin to interpret the data you gather, consider the context within which poor people in this nation live.

Poverty relief efforts (10 points)
Name and describe at least 3 government or private/non-profit programs that are intended to directly or indirectly alleviate poverty within the nation you are investigating.
Do they focus on buidling resiliency?
Do they target individual level, family level or community level factors?
Are they grass-roots programs or top-down programs?

=Helpful link to program ideas:

Rural Poverty Portal

http://www.ruralpovertyportal.org/

-Choose your country from the right side of the page, then when it appears, choose Projects and programmes from the left side bar.

Compare poverty alleviation efforts to those in the US (10 points)
Compare the poverty alleviation efforts between the US and the country you have selected for your profile.
How are the programs similar or different in the 2 countries?
Do the programs reflect similar or different ideologies?
Do you think the US could learn something from any of the programs you have discussed from your profile country?

=US Programs to consider:

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
Medicaid (TANF)
Children’s Health Insurance Program
Women, Infants and Children Program
Title X: The National Family Planning Program
Section 8 Housing Voucher Program
Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program
Weatherization Assistance Program
Unemployment insurance
Earned Income Tax Credit
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
Child Care Assistance Program
Head Start / Early Head Start
National School Lunch Program
The Emergency Food Assistance Program
Local Food Banks
Federal Pell Grant
Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant
Federal Work-Study

APA
You need to cite your references throughout your paper in this format: (Author, year). If no author is given (ie. a web source) then cite the first few words of the title of the article and year. If you cite a direct quote you need to include the page number the quote is from. If the quote is from a website you need to cite which section of the website the quote is from.

You must cite at least 8 references in your reference page using APA style with Hanging Indents. Papers need to be double spaced, 1″ margins, and 12-point font. The reference page also needs to be double spaced, meaning each citation is double spaced (not single).

Check out these Guidelines for Class Papers:

APA tutorial:

http://www.apastyle.org/learn/tutorials/basics-tutorial.aspx

Citing sources in your Reference page:

http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/DocAPAReferences.html

Purdue OWL Writing Lab: APA tips https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/

APA Citation Style Quick Guide: WSU http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/quickguides/apa

Please refer to Optional APA Self Quizzes, found in the Guidelines for Papers link on the Course Information page of Learning Modules for help with properly citing, also refer to the Course Information page of Learning Modules for great poverty websites.

Additional Resources

The CIA World Factbook is a great place to start in locating data on your country

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html

The Population Reference Bureau has a feature on their site where you can generate a data comparison for 2 or more countries.

http://www.prb.org/DataFinder.aspx

Index Mundi

http://www.indexmundi.com/

Another helpful link: Human Development Reports

http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries

Eldis: Country Profiles for Poverty

http://www.eldis.org/go/country-profiles&theme=895#.VSWCYHBzcoA

The measurement of poverty: the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)

The measurement of poverty: the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)

Grading Criteria
Criteria Points
1. Cultural background 5
2. Historical/political context 5
3. Sources and distribution of wealth 5
4. Economic and non-economic indicators of well-being 20
5. Poverty relief efforts 10
6. Compare poverty alleviation efforts to those in the US 10
7. Reference in APA style 5
TOTAL 60

Preparing File for Submission

Save your assignment as a (.doc) or (.rtf) file. If you are using any program that saves files automatically with a different extension (other than .doc or .rtf), you must choose to save as file type Microsoft Word (.doc) or Rich Text Format (.rtf), unless otherwise stated in your assignment guidelines, or the assignment will not be accepted. WordPerfect files will NOT be accepted.

Include your own name in the title of the electronic file for identification purposes, for example “JaneDoe3C.doc” and do NOT use any spaces, punctuation, or special characters in the file name. After completing the assignment, submit it for grading using the assignment drop box as indicated below.