The problem of youth unemployment continues to rise in countries around the world, and for many adolescents whose early working lives are marred with challenges and obstacles, such disadvantages are likely to have lifelong implications and to ensure cycles of poverty and inequality. Policy responses to the youth unemployment problem, particularly in the United States, have largely ignored the evidence that adolescents are a unique population that requires both a deeper understanding of the problem and bespoke policy interventions.

This dissertation challenges policymakers to change their perceptions of the problem of youth unemployment to one of work disparities with the purpose of shifting the focus to the social and psychological nuances that are also a part of the problem. Doing so allows for the application to the study of the problem of psychosocial development theory, which posits that individuals develop an identification with work across their pre-adult lifespan, and that work roles, choices, and behaviors are extensions of this process. To understand youth work disparities thus requires examining their identity development experiences.

The findings of the quantitative study provide some support for the relationship between psychosocial development predictors and young adult work outcomes. Furthermore, the examination of the identity development and employment trajectories of 20 Latino males in California revealed stark developmental differences between those who had attained at least a four-year college degree and white-collar employment compared to those who had attained neither and who struggled with unemployment. The findings provide a base from which to develop new policies that focus on supporting developmental pathways to healthy employment outcomes across the pre-adult lifespan.

The very term "poverty" continues to evoke debates on what it means to be poor. Although poverty is commonly described in uni-dimensional or monetary terms, many scholars have argued that poverty is more aptly understood as a constellation of deprivations -- a multi-dimensional concept. Different measures unavoidably generate different results, and the extent of poverty is, thus, dependent on the measure used to quantify the number of poor in a given society. A looming question today is whether the official federal poverty measure, developed in the 1960s, still provides an accurate picture of the poor in America. In order to rectify the long-questioned adequacy and validity of the federal poverty measure, Congress authorized the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to address key shortcomings of the official measure. In early 2010, the Obama administration adopted the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) that largely follows the recommendations of the NAS Panel. However, the NAS-based measure is still criticized for taking a "reductionist" approach to understanding a complex, socially constructed, and dynamic concept like poverty. To counter the limitations of income-based measures of poverty, there has been a push to advance the field by employing multi-dimensional poverty measures. Amartya Sen laid the groundwork for a paradigm shift in the way poverty is conceptualized. He defines poverty as the lack of capability to generate or obtain the required resources to meet one's basic needs. Drawing on Sen's ideas, the UNDP introduced the Multi-dimensional Poverty Index in 2010, which complements income poverty by measuring the number of deprivations a poor person faces simultaneously with regard to education, health, and living standard. Using secondary data analysis, this study first examines changes in poverty rates by gender, marital status, and race/ethnicity based on the official measure and the supplemental poverty measure in the period 2005-2010. Next, this study creates a multi-dimensional measure for the U.S. that mimics the UN's Multi-dimensional Poverty Index. This study seeks to contribute to the literature by exploring how such a measure can help us better understand the profile of poverty in America today and what the ensuing policy implications are.

INTRODUCTION

Given that concentrated poverty is deepening around the world, the international development community now has even more reason to address this issue. Development aid has ostensibly served as an important policy instrument for promoting the welfare of marginalized communities in the Global South. The effectiveness of such efforts can be evaluated from varying angles but the first test to pass is its relevance to the lives of the most marginalized. This dissertation evaluates the extent to which aid activity is suited to the needs and priorities of recipients using three lenses: 1) needs assessment at the global level, 2) the design of interventions at the country level, and 3) evaluations at the sub-national level. The first chapter identifies the salient dimensions of poverty from the monetary and capability perspectives, using a cross-country analysis for 188 developing countries. The second chapter introduces a framework for analyzing two community development models in Myanmar as a country case study. The third chapter explores whether community development projects reach the poorest villages. It combines satellite imagery with spatial analysis to evaluate sub-national aid distribution. This study suggests strategies to deploy aid resources in a way to maximize their impact on people living in absolute poverty and data-sparse contexts.

CHAPTER 1. THE DISCREPANCY BETWEEN TWO APPROACHES TO GLOBAL POVERTY: WHAT DOES IT REVEAL?

For decades, development communities have attempted to develop poverty measures that can be used to inform need assessment and aid allocation. Building on these efforts, this paper examines the discrepancies between global poverty measures and brings that analysis to bear on identifying the salient dimensions of poverty in developing countries. It first compares the monetary and capability approaches to poverty and identifies comparable indices from each approach: the poverty headcount ratio (P0) and the multidimensional poverty headcount ratio (H). This paper then describes the degree of overlap and discrepancy between P0 and H for 118 developing countries from 2000 to 2014, synthesizing the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), World Development Indicators, and OECD aid activity data. On average, there is a high correlation between the two poverty measures, but considerable discrepancies surface for some countries. I analyze the position of these countries with respect to the fitted line of the two measures, classifying them into income-poor and capability-poor countries. Countries such as Pakistan and Ethiopia, for example, are experiencing “capability poverty” while Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe are experiencing “income poverty.” I examine whether aid composition corresponds to the country’s relative income and poverty status, finding that capability-poor countries receive marginally higher social sectoral aid compared with economic sector aid. This study suggests that discrepancies between measures of international poverty can be used to target, monitor, and evaluate global aid distribution.

CHAPTER 2 ALTERNATIVE MODELS OF COMMUNITY-LED DEVELOPMENT: IMPLICATIONS FOR POLICY AND PRACTICE

Reconciling the dual imperatives of legitimate state building and efficient service delivery, Community-led Development (CLD) has been praised as “a new form of engagement” in providing aid to fragile states. However, whether or how the CLD represents a new model of practice remains poorly understood. The absence of an analytical framework for distinguishing alternative CLD approaches to development aid hinders both the design of context-specific interventions and the evaluation of their impacts. This dissertation aims to compare two alternative models of CLDs against a backdrop provided by the framework of community-led development. Using document reviews and stakeholder interviews, this paper analyzes two aid projects in Myanmar: the Korean government-supported Saemaul Undong (SMU, New Village Movement), which reflects the perspective of the developmental state, and the World Bank-supported National Community-Driven Development Project (NCDDP), which reflects the perspective of the revised neoliberalism. Next, this study proposes the Agency-Power-Dimension (APD) framework for use in describing donors’ general CLD aid policies in conjunction with specific CLD projects in Myanmar. The Agency-Power-Dimension (APD) framework is proposed to describe donors’ general CLD aid policies in conjunction with specific CLD projects in Myanmar. This study finds that the intervention strategies of SMU and NCDDP differ regarding the main agency of change, the handling of power, and the objectives of projects. SMU engages with government extension workers as the main change agent, and its accountability comes from the performance of projects that focuses on agricultural production. In contrast, NCDDP works with private facilitators, emphasizing the processes of inclusion in the context of public infrastructure development. Previously, impact evaluations of CLDs set hypotheses based on the logical progression of the projects whose indicators are diffused over broad socio-economic domains. The APD framework identifies the main facets of treatment arms in future experimental studies. Policymakers seeking development opportunities in other fragile states can compare East Asian/Southern and Western/Northern approaches and apply it to varying local conditions.

CHAPTER 3: MAPPING COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT AID: SPATIAL ANALYSIS IN MYANMAR

Aid policy has the potential to alleviate global poverty by targeting areas of concentrated need. However, few aid-determinant studies have analyzed the characteristics of poverty at the sub-national level, and even those studies were conducted with their units of analysis at a high administrative level such as the state. This study intends to fill this knowledge gap by portraying poverty at the granular level, and promoting the evaluation of aid towards the most marginalized communities. The goal of this study is to explore the extent to which community-led-development (CLD) projects take place in poor villages, using the case of Myanmar. It also analyzes how two CLD models, National Community-Driven Development Project (NCDDP) and Saemaul Undong (SMU) target needs differently. To collect outcome variables, I develop web scraping algorithms to create comprehensive and up-to-date locations of CLD participating villages (n=12,282). As for exploratory variables, radiance values from nighttime satellite imagery are extracted to estimate wealth at the community level. In addition, I spatially interpolate the DHS wealth index to make inferences on poverty in aid sites. By geospatially matching aid and wealth related data, I test factors that explain variation in the distribution of CLD and different approaches to community development. The results show mixed evidence of poverty-oriented targeting. First, as each increment of the share of a vulnerable population rises, the likelihood of aid presence in that community declines by 4%. Next, the density of community development projects is higher in areas shining brighter. A one unit increase in the nightlight intensity increases the number of projects by 86 within a two-degree radius of a DHS village cluster. Among villages of similar levels of nightlights and population, however, aid goes to areas with lower assets. Last, NCDDP, which emphasizes inclusion and collaboration, supports poorer villages farther away from conflict events. In contrast, SMU, which considers competition conductive to performance, supports more established areas including villages near conflict zones. Unlike previous studies finding that state-level aid allocations favor the richest, this more fine-grained analysis suggests that a need-based allocation is also in place. The nuances captured in nightlight luminosity are also shown to improve predictions of aid distribution. Synthesizing new sources of data can be used to assess area-based interventions in the context of poverty and conflict where traditional survey is too costly.

CONCLUSION

This study draws attention to alternative forms of evidence-based targeting, design, and evaluation of aid from poverty-oriented perspectives. The first chapter reveals that there are 1.5 times more capability poor countries than income poor ones, and the capability poor countries receive marginally higher social sectoral aid relative to economic sector aid. The second chapter finds that the intervention strategies of the revised neo-liberal (NCDDP) and the developmental state (SMU) model differ in terms of the main agency of change, the handling of power, and the primary dimension of projects. The third chapter highlights that community development aid in Myanmar flows to villages with low assets but also with higher nightlight luminosity and a lower proportion of vulnerable populations. These three chapters also speak to the evolution of an aid landscape with a distinctive way of delivering aid and generating empirical evidence. This study concludes with a call for both research and practice to return to the basics, and to begin by considering client and user needs. Grounding development policy in more contextualized knowledge, the development community can better serve the “bottom billion.”

Labor markets have been segmented typically based on skill-levels of workers in the United States and in many other economically advanced countries. Since welfare reform 1996, the welfare system in the United States has increasingly linked labor market participation to the eligibility for public benefits. This development signals a shift in public responsibility for economic security and social protection to the private sector and employers. However, welfare recipients are mostly low-income workers and, as outsiders in the labor market, they often have disadvantages, which include limited employment benefits. Therefore, the relationship between labor market and social protection for low-income workers has continuously increased economic inequality and disparity in social protection in the United States.

This dissertation research draws on the theoretical concepts of dualization embedded in the structures of the labor market and social protection derived from the welfare state. Focusing on economic disparities and social protection for low-income workers, this study analyzes public benefit use by low-income workers and the effects of changes in economic conditions. Specifically, the analyses focus on the extent to which low-income workers use public benefits and the way these choices are related to public and private employment sectors and employer-based private benefits in particular. It also examines how different characteristics of individual, family and household, and other labor market components are associated with public benefit use by low-income workers; the analyses include the differences between household and state levels regarding the public benefit use. Statistical analyses for these inquiries involve cross-sectional and multilevel modeling of large scale data sets.

The findings of this study show that many low-income workers cannot obtain economic security and adequate social protection through employers, given current labor market structure. Also, these findings indicate that the employment conditions and benefits provided through employers are already determined by the low-level segmentation in the labor market, rather than the public and private sectors in which low-income workers are engaged. Thus, the dualization process has increased the inequality between insiders and outsiders, which strengthens the social divide.

The United States plays a central role in the global response to individuals displaced by violence and persecution, offering permanent resettlement and a pathway to citizenship to more refugees than any other nation. Upon arrival in the US, refugees face a number of challenges in adjusting to their new lives and achieving the goal of economic self-sufficiency laid out by the Federal Resettlement Program. Across the country, recently resettled refugees’ employment and economic standings fall below those of the general public, as well as other immigrant populations.

While some scholars have attempted to gain an understanding of refugee economic incorporation (e.g., employment status, income) and its determinants, existing studies have fallen short of reliably doing so. The existing literature is limited by outdated findings, small non-representative samples, vague operationalization of outcomes, and a general lack of theoretical underpinning. This study serves to address these gaps in academic scholarship, leveraging inferential statistical analysis to identify factors that predict refugee economic incorporation across four measurable outcomes: binary employment status, elapsed time to first employment, hours worked per week, and hourly wage.

This study utilizes nonpublic survey data secured from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). Collected via the ORR’s Annual Survey Questionnaire of Refugees, the data captures a wide range of information on respondents’ lives, including demographic information, pre-resettlement experiences, post-resettlement activities, household characteristics, and economic performance. The survey data—compiled in 2013—was gathered through a random stratified sampling scheme, ensuring national representativeness. Multi-level logistic and ordinary least squares regression modeling was performed to identify predictors of the four economic outcomes listed above.

Regression modeling results suggest a high degree of predictive power at the demographic level; that is, the collection of non-modifiable traits and factors refugees bring with them to the resettlement process. These factors include gender, marital status and region of origin, among others. In addition, a number of post-resettlement factors were found to be predictive of employment and economic outcomes, including participation in job training and improvements in English language proficiency.

This study’s results yield a number of implications for future research, resettlement practice, and policy. Moving forward, research on the incorporation of refugees in permanent resettlement contexts should incorporate both quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as a holistic view of study outcomes beyond traditional economic indicators. In this vein, results from the study can be utilized to begin development of a modern, evidence-informed resettlement practice framework that integrates multi-faceted assessment, diverse service planning, and rigorous program evaluation. In the policy realm, findings call for a reassessment of the rapid-employment resettlement model, as well as a renewed focus on identifying and accommodating particularly vulnerable refugee subpopulations.