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• Unworthy poverty as social relations

  43-60

  Wolfgang Aschauer

  Eva Malovics

  Views:

  412

  The paper deals with recent discourses on poverty, exemplified by the case of Hungarian Romany community. For this purpose we first deduce from the theoretical framework of the underclass three way of viewing extreme poverty: the political-economic type that traces poverty back to developments of the whole society; the culturalistic type in which poverty is the result of certain behavioural deficiencies (the “culture”) of the poor; and the interdependency type that regards poverty as induced by factors in the society as a whole and perpetuated by poverty specific cultural elements of the poor themselves.
  In the second part of the study we discuss three fields of discourse with respect to the question of which of the mentioned types can be found there. In the field of social sciences it is preeminently the interdependency type which occurs, probably because of its capability to link many, even heterogeneous, observations. In public discourse – analyzed by considering an internet debate and two so-called scandals – the culturalistic type dominates: Romanies are poor, because they have Romany cultural (behavioural) deficiencies. The Romanies themselves mainly use elements of the political-economic type, explaining poverty in terms of general impoverishment, regional neglect, and group discrimination.

  Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) classification: I32, J15, J16, O15

• The Effect of the Economic Crisis on Income Poverty in the Southern Great Plain Region

  61-75

  Eszter Siposne Nandori

  Views:

  106

  The paper examines the effect of the economic crisis and the related negative economic phenomena on the income poverty of those living in the Southern Great Plain region. The regional income poverty is examined using the poverty measures based on the income data of workers and wage earners. I then analyse how economic performance affects poverty measures. The analysis proves that not only the economic growth of the given county, but also the economic performance of the neighbouring counties have an effect on the poverty rate. Economic growth, however, is not enough to reduce the depth of poverty; therefore other measures to improve the conditions of the poor are also required. In the end, the spatial autocorrelation is examined in the Southern Great Plain region.

  Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) classification: I32, R12

• Twenty-one Economic Arguments against an Unconditional Basic Income

  5-29

  Istvan Csillag

  Peter Mihalyi

  Views:

  343

  In 2013/14 there has been an intense public debate both in the European Union and in Hungary on the feasibility of Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) support. In the Hungarian context, the publication of a 100-page proposal was an important milestone, in which a group of experts applied the UBI concept to the present circumstances. The study, the brainchild of István Bánfalvi, a distinguished social policy practitioner, proposed the following specific amounts as from January 2015: HUF 25,000 for children (≈ EUR 83), HUF 50,000 for adults and HUF 75,000 for expectant mothers. The present paper’s first objective was to challenge the entire 25-50-75 concept from both theoretical and practical-administrative perspectives. In addition, we tried to show that income poverty in Hungary is much less of a problem than generally presumed. Our final conclusion is that from a poverty alleviation point of view the geographical remobilization of the Hungarian Roma population is by far the most important issue. Roma living in small rural settlements should be assisted to move towards large cities, where the chances of finding work, education and health care are much better.

  Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) classification: H21, I38, J15