Poverty: the role of institutions, behaviours and culture

Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published a new report, Poverty: the role of institutions, behaviours and culture that investigates how much individuals, institutional structures and culture influence poverty levels. With unemployment rising, pressure on incomes, and cuts to public services, it is not unreasonable to believe poverty will become a pressing issue over coming years.

This paper assesses some of the causes of poverty and examines the role played by:

* family structure;
* employment and intergenerational worklessness;
* geographical concentrations of poverty;
* educational outcomes;
* addiction to alcohol and drugs; and
* debt.

Amongst the conclusions are that provision of family-related benefits, the incentives provided for work (through, for example, tax credits but also through the provision of measures to support parents at work, such as childcare), and the availability of jobs all play a very important role in influencing poverty. The availability of jobs matters not just for individual poverty but also to communities, with the geographical concentration of worklessness and unemployment among the young posing particular problems of ‘scarring’. A lack of economic opportunities for men has also been shown to influence family forms, reducing the value of marriage for women to marry and increasing the likelihood of becoming a lone parent.

Importantly, a specific charge against the provision of welfare benefits is that they have led to a growing dependency culture. The interaction of agency and structure, in this context, is argued to have led to a breakdown in personal responsibility, a rise in family breakdown and lone parenthood, and the growth of a culture of dependency and intergenerational worklessness (for example, the Centre for Social Justice, 2006). The report finds that the evidence for this is much less clear. Welfare dependency as an explanation for the growth in family breakdown does not fit well with the facts.

The rise in unemployment is likely to be the greatest barrier to poverty reduction in coming years. This structural challenge to poverty is not being addressed under current policy reforms, which emphasise supply-side changes and the role of agency in determining overall poverty rates.

For more information and a link to the full report, see Poverty: the role of institutions, behaviours and culture