Archive for the 'Human Capital, Labor & Wealth' Category

Reaching Those in Need: State Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Participation Rates in 2008
By: Karen E. Cunnygham and Laura A. Castner
Source: USDA, Food and Nutrition Service

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—formerly the Food Stamp Program—is a central component of American policy to alleviate hunger and poverty. The program’s main purpose is “to permit low-income households to obtain a more nutritious diet…by increasing their purchasing power” (Food and Nutrition Act of 2008). SNAP is the largest of the domestic food and nutrition assistance programs administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service. During fiscal year 2010, the program served 40 million people in an average month at a total annual cost of almost $65 billion in benefits.

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Where is the Learning? Measuring Schooling Efforts in Developing Countries
Jacques van der Gaag and Anda Adams
Source: Brookings

Introduction:

Achieving universal education is a twofold challenge: to get children and youth into school and then to teach them something meaningful while they are there. While important progress has been made on the first challenge, there is a crisis unfolding in relation to learning. Around the world, there have been major gains in primary school enrollment partly due to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals and the abolition of school fees by many national governments. However in many countries, students are spending years in school without learning core competencies, such as reading and writing. To address this learning crisis, the global community and national governments need to place a much greater focus on the ultimate objective of education—to acquire knowledge and develop skills.

This shift in focus away from just enrollment to enrollment plus quality learning requires measuring learning outcomes. However, the global education community is not yet systematically using effective instruments for measuring primary school learning in low- and middle-income countries. This policy brief reviews the global efforts among the primary donors to support the measurement of learning outcomes. It then suggests steps needed to transition global education policy into a new paradigm of enrollment plus quality learning, which includes: scaling up the implementation of national education accounts and national assessment systems; increasing attention to monitoring early learning during child development to improve readiness for school; and expanding the systematic use of simple assessments of basic cognitive functions in the early grades to help teachers improve their practice.

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Correctional Populations in the United States, 2009
By: Lauren Glaze
Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics

Presents summary data on the number of adults under some form of correctional supervision in the United States at yearend 2009. Correctional supervision includes adults supervised in the community on probation or parole and those incarcerated in prison or local jails. The report provides a comparison between the change in the correctional population observed since 2000 and the changes observed during the 1980s and 1990s, which illustrates the slowing of growth in the population during each decade. It also includes the number of men and women under each correctional status and trend analysis of men and women under correctional supervision since 1990.

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Least Developed Countries Report, 2010: Towards a New International Development Architecture for LDCs
Source: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)

From Introduction:

Over the past three decades, the LDCs have been following a development strategy designed to release the creative potential of market forces by reducing the role of the State in the development process. For the first two of those decades, there was little indication that this strategy was working. But after the turn of the millennium, with the emergence of new Asian growth drivers and favourable movements in the terms of trade, economic growth began to accelerate. Some observers attributed this to the market-oriented policy reforms undertaken
by a number of LDCs, though others raised doubts about their pattern of growth. Surging commodity prices, in some cases driven by speculative investment, debt forgiveness, increased aid flows, remittances and foreign direct investment (FDI) seemed vulnerable to a global economic downturn. There were also concerns that growth was not translating into substantial improvement in human well-being. When commodity prices suddenly fell at the end of 2008, heralding a bust in the global economic cycle, many LDCs experienced a sharp slowdown,
with major adverse social consequences. It was clear from this that markets are not only creative but also can be destructive.

Full report (PDF)

Household Food Security in the United States, 2009
By: Mark Nord, Alisha Coleman-Jensen, Margaret Andrews, and Steven Carlson
Source: USDA, Economic Research Service

Eighty-five percent of American households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2009, meaning that they had access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The remaining households (14.7 percent) were food insecure at least some time during the year, including 5.7 percent with very low food security. In households with very low food security, the food intake of one or more household members was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food. Prevalence rates of food insecurity and very low food security were essentially unchanged from 14.6 percent and 5.7 percent, respectively, in 2008, and remained at the highest recorded levels since 1995, when the first national food security survey was conducted. The typical food-secure household spent 33 percent more on food than the typical food-insecure household of the same size and household composition. Fifty-seven percent of all food-insecure households participated in one or more of the three largest Federal food and nutrition assistance programs during the month prior to the 2009 survey.

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