The 2010 UNRISD (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development) Flagship Report, Combating Poverty and Inequality – Structural Change, Social Policy and Politics, explores the causes, dynamics and persistence of poverty; it examines what works and what has gone wrong in international policy thinking and practice, and lays out a range of policies and institutional measures that countries can adopt to alleviate poverty. The report argues that current approaches to poverty often ignore its root causes, and consequently do not follow through the causal sequence. Rather, they focus on measuring things that people lack to the detriment of understanding why they lack them.

Such an approach contrasts with contemporary efforts to reduce poverty through discrete social policies that are often weakly related to a country’s system of production or macro- economic policies.
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