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62. SARS: Down But Still a Threat
- Publication Date:
- 08-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
- Abstract:
- This Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) was requested by Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson and Ambassador Jack Chow, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Health Affairs. It highlights the evolution of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and the potential implications of the disease for the United States under several scenarios; this paper does not attempt to provide a scientific assessment of the epidemiology of SARS. Even though SARS has infected and killed far fewer people than other common infectious diseases such as influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS, it has had a disproportionately large economic and political impact because it spread in areas with broad international commercial links and received intense media attention as a mysterious new illness that seemed able to go anywhere and hit anyone.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Human Welfare, Poverty, and Third World
- Political Geography:
- United States
63. Living at the Edge: America's Low-Income Children and Families
- Author:
- Hsien-Hen Lu, Younghwan Song, Mary Clare Lennon, and J. Lawrence Aber
- Publication Date:
- 10-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University
- Abstract:
- By analyzing data from the Current Population Survey March Supplements, Living at the Edge explores the following questions about children in low-income families in the United States: What are the overall changes in the low-income and poverty rates for children over the past quarter century? How has the population of children in low-income families changed over the past decade? Which children are more likely to live in low-income families? How have changes in parental employment status affected the likelihood of children living in low-income families? What are the state by state variations in child low-income and poverty rates, and how have these changed in the last decade? How does a more inclusive definition of family income and expenses affect our understanding of the poverty and near-poverty rates of children in low-income families? This report helps document significant improvements in the child lowincome rate as well as the significant decrease in the proportion of children who relied on public assistance during the 1990s. However, Living at the Edge also finds a notable increase in the share of children who lived in near-poor families (those with incomes between 100 and 200 percent of the poverty line) among children in low-income families during the 1990s. Many disadvantaged groups of children, including those with young parents, minority parents, parents with limited education, or unmarried parents, were less likely to live in poor or lowincome families in the late 1990s than such children a decade earlier. The improvement in the child low-income rates of these disadvantaged groups was closely related to an increase in parental employment during the late 1990s. However, the low-income rate worsened for children whose more educated parent had a high-school diploma but no college education. For children of many disadvantaged social groups, parental employment appears to do less to protect them from economic hardship then it did a decade earlier. The groups that suffered the most in reduced economic security given parental employment status were those in the medium risk ranks (children in families with at least one parent between ages 25 to 39, children whose more educated parent had only has a high school diploma, and in father-only families). The report also notes that the official measure of poverty ignores the burden of medical and work related expenses as well as taxes and therefore tends to underestimate the share of children in near-poor and low-income families facing economic insecurity. Finally, we discuss the policy implications for our findings.
- Topic:
- Economics, Human Welfare, and Poverty
- Political Geography:
- United States
64. Health Insurance Coverage of Children in Mixed-Status Immigrant Families
- Author:
- Randy Capps, Genevieve M. Kenney, and Michael E. Fix
- Publication Date:
- 11-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Urban Institute
- Abstract:
- Public health insurance coverage increased—and rates of uninsurance decreased—between 1999 and 2002 among two groups of low-income, U.S. citizen children: those with parents who are native or naturalized U.S. citizens and those with at least one immigrant parent who is not a U.S. citizen (referred to as mixed-status families). The improvements followed efforts on the part of the states and the federal government to expand coverage of children under Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and the introduction of policies directed at improving Medicaid and SCHIP access for immigrant and non-English-speaking families. Nonetheless, more than one in five citizen children in low-income mixed-status families remained uninsured in 2002—a rate 74 percent higher than that of children with citizen parents.
- Topic:
- Health, Human Welfare, Migration, and Poverty
- Political Geography:
- United States
65. Putin's Agenda, America's Choice: Russia's Search for Strategic Stability
- Author:
- Carol Graham
- Publication Date:
- 04-2002
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- The Brookings Institution
- Abstract:
- In May, President George W. Bush travels to Moscow and St. Petersburg for his fourth summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the past year, Putin has made a number of compromises with America on key questions such as the United States' withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the presence of U.S. troops in Central Asia. As a result, American commentators have speculated about how many concessions Putin needs from the United States to placate his domestic critics and maintain the positive momentum of U.S.-Russia relations.
- Topic:
- Human Welfare, International Organization, and Poverty
- Political Geography:
- Russia, United States, America, Central Asia, and Moscow
66. In Defense of Environment and Security Research
- Author:
- Richard A. Matthew
- Publication Date:
- 08-2002
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- The Wilson Center
- Abstract:
- Since the end of the Cold War, many policymakers and researchers have been rethinking and pushing the boundaries of the definition of security. Perhaps the most extensive and controversial part of this project has been the numerous and varied attempts to identify links among environmental change, conflict, and security. But concern has recently been raised about whether a decade of environmental security research, debate, and policy experimentation has produced worthwhile results. This article argues that such concern is premature. Environmental security has (a) reinvigorated important elements of security research and policy; (b) made pioneering contributions to understanding the shifting sources of global violence and the changing requirements of security; (c) contributed to a broader debate about the social and political effects of transnational change; and (d) been a conceptual and political boon for the environmental movement. Now is the time to build on these gains instead of abandoning them.
- Topic:
- Security, Environment, Migration, and Poverty
- Political Geography:
- United States
67. Security and Ecology in the Age of Globalization
- Author:
- Simon Dalby
- Publication Date:
- 08-2002
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- The Wilson Center
- Abstract:
- The environment has emerged as a major theme in the post-Cold War discussion of human security. There has been a considerable amount of detailed empirical work on the relationship between environmental change and likely conflicts. This article argues that, while the interconnections between the environment and conflict are many and complex, the likelihood of large-scale warfare over renewable resources is small. Nonetheless, environmental difficulties do render many people insecure. A parallel conceptual discussion suggests that the empirical work of environmental security research needs to be placed in the larger context of global economic changes and large-scale urbanization of a growing humanity. This urban population increasingly draws resources from rural areas, disrupting indigenous populations. All these dynamics are also complicated by the rapidly increasing scale of human activities, which has induced a level of material- and energy-flow through the global economy that is a new and substantial ecological factor in the biosphere. Given the scale of these processes, societies should carefully consider these interconnections and reduce their total resource throughput to improve environmental security and develop sustainable modes of living for the future.
- Topic:
- Security, Environment, Migration, and Poverty
- Political Geography:
- United States
68. The Health and Well-Being of Children in Immigrant Families
- Author:
- Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Jame Reardon-Anderson
- Publication Date:
- 11-2002
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Urban Institute
- Abstract:
- Children of immigrants are the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population under age 18 (Van Hook and Fix 2000). One in five children in the United States is the child of an immigrant, evidence of the demographic impact of recent rapid immigration. In addition, one in four low income children is an immigrant's child (Fix, Zimmermann, and Passel 2001). But despite their demographic and policy significance, children of immigrants and their well-being are rarely studied on a national scale. In this brief, we present a number of key indicators—both positive and negative—of child well-being. The measures fall within three areas: (1) family environment, (2) physical and emotional health, and (3) access to needed services.
- Topic:
- Human Welfare, Migration, and Poverty
- Political Geography:
- United States
69. Fieldwork Methodology for a CDIE Assessment of USAID and Poverty Reduction Approaches
- Author:
- Jonathan Sleeper and Lynn Salinger
- Publication Date:
- 08-2001
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- United States Agency for International Development
- Abstract:
- The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, U.N. agencies, many bilateral donors, and a number of developing countries have made poverty reduction their overarching development objective. The United States was a signatory in 1996 to the OECD/DAC's international development goals, which included halving of world poverty by 2015. Under the aegis of a comprehensive development framework which empowers national partners to design and implement their own development actions, debt relief for the world's most heavily indebted poor countries is being linked by the multinational development organizations to the development of national Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs).
- Topic:
- Development, Economics, Human Welfare, and Poverty
- Political Geography:
- United States
70. Hardship Among Children of Immigrants: Findings From the 1999 National Survey of American Families
- Author:
- Randy Capps
- Publication Date:
- 02-2001
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Urban Institute
- Abstract:
- The 1999 National Survey of America's Families (NSAF) reveals that hardship is greater for children of immigrants than for children of U.S. natives in three areas of basic need: food, housing, and health care. The data also indicate that the relative generosity of differing state policies on noncitizens' access to public benefits generally corresponds with hardship levels. Because the NSAF cross-sectional data do not allow assessment of changes over time, these hardship levels cannot necessarily be ascribed to federal welfare reform or state policies. Nonetheless, these findings reinforce observations on the vulnerability of a population whose access to the social safety net has been diminished by recent policy changes. This analysis is one of the first studies based on nationally representative data to examine hardship among immigrant families in the post-welfare-reform era.
- Topic:
- Human Welfare, Migration, and Poverty
- Political Geography:
- United States