Open research questions in Income, Poverty, and Inequality
125 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 5,360 Income, Poverty, and Inequality papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
The study recommends that policymakers must adopt a balanced approach, focusing on poverty reduction, inclusive economic policies, and transparent governance to ensure lasting security in West African region and equitable resource distribution. To address the counterintuitive finding that higher poverty relates with reduced recorded security threats, West African governments should invest significantly in improving security incident reporting systems, particularly in impoverished and rural areas. This would involve strengthening local governance institutions, enhancing police presence and responsiveness in remote regions, and implementing community-based security monitoring systems. More accurate data collection is essential for formulating effective security policies that reflect ground realities rather than reporting biases.
The mixed results across linguistic blocs highlight that the mechanisms linking security threats, poverty, and inequality, including measurement differences, varying economic structures, and diverse institutional contexts, vary significantly across different sub-regional environments.
It should be recognised that the time span of the data used in this study is limited from 2018 to 2024. This limitation reduces the breadth of analysis of the dynamics over the long term, and makes the conclusions obtained context-bound. Nonetheless, this period still has relevance for illustrating education policy responses in the short term. Therefore, further research with a longer time duration and longitudinal approach is highly recommended to understand the effect of education on poverty and inequality more thoroughly. In addition, this period shows significant changes in the social and economic context at the national level, including after the COVID-19 pandemic, thus still contributing to an up-to-date empirical understanding. To strengthen these findings, further research with a wider range of data and considering other factors such as the quality of education, demographic changes, and policies in various sectors is highly recommended. Longitudinal studies with a longer time horizon can provide a more in-depth view of the effect of education on inequality and poverty over a long period of time.
Promote female education: Governments and stakeholders should invest in education and skill development programs for rural women to enhance their capacity to engage in productive economic activities. Improve access to credit and financial services: Financial institutions should provide affordable loans and microcredit schemes to rural women to support small businesses and agricultural activities in the study area. Strengthen women’s access to productive resources: Policies should be implemented to ensure that rural women have equal access to land, farming inputs, and modern agricultural technologies. Encourage cooperative societies: Rural women should be encouraged to join cooperatives and community organizations to improve access to training, markets, and financial support. Develop rural infrastructure and employment opportunities: Governments should invest in rural development programs that create jobs and improve market access, thereby increasing income opportunities for rural women.
ASSESSING THE PREVALENCE AND DETERMINANTS OF INCOME POVERTY AMONG RURAL WOMEN IN MINJIBIR LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF KANO STATE · 2026 · DOIGovernment commitment and role to support the poor Governments remain the key role players in the alleviation of poverty. They must alleviate the scourge through policies and responsive programmes such as social security. According to Prenovitz (2021), social security programmes are vital to assist the poor financially. They utilise the money to take care of themselves and avoid extreme poverty. Various scholars such as Guo et al., (2023) have indicated that poverty-related policies and programmes must be able to assist the poor to afford or have access to public housing, improve and determine the minimum wages and salaries, increase child support, address food insecurity especially for children, ensure quality education to improve the skills required for development, as well as improve health and infrastructural needs. Heshmati and Tsionas (2023) concurred that the government’s poverty-related policies and programmes assist to tackle poverty, and to reduce inequality. In managing these programmes and policies, the government must be dedicated and promote good governance. A lack of these aspects automatically impedes the success of the initial plans and objectives.
M Matyana (a)* M Mpofu (b) (a, b)Department of Public Administration, University of Zululand A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T Article history: Received 12 February 2026 Received in rev. form 18 March 2026 Accepted 21 March 2026 Keywords: Challenges, Poverty, Post-Apartheid Era, Prospects, South Africa JEL Classification: I32, O55, I38, D63 Almost half of South Africa's population still lives in poverty, despite the abolishment of the oppressive apartheid regime since April 1994. The majority of the populace is impoverished and unable to enjoy sustainable life and progress. Therefore, this paper is here by analysing poverty in post-apartheid South Africa by looking at what still causing poverty after so many years of freedom and how poverty effects the communities and what solutions can be adopted overcome the situation. A qualitative research methodology was used to collect data. Particularly, a systematic literature review was used. The researchers have reviewed published articles and reports about poverty. Based on the findings it is evident that poverty in South Africa is caused by challenges such as pandemics, poor health and education systems, climate change, economic inequality etc. Therefore, the paper recommends various actions to be taken such as striving to enhance economic output. © 2026 by the authors. Licensee SSBFNET, Istanbul, Turkey. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
The substantial tax burden associated with UBI implementation must be carefully managed to ensure that the societal benefits outweigh the financial costs, calling for further research into tax structures that align with economic and social goals.
Our results show that MI support varies widely across EU countries, with most failing to reach half of households in extreme poverty or provide adequate support, particularly for larger families.
The application of night‐time satellite imagery in 2015 can effectively make up for the shortcomings of insufficient data at various scales, especially for developing countries.
Evaluation of economic inequality in ‘the Belt and Road’ region – The application of night‐time satellite imagery · 2024 · DOIRecommendations for future research emerge: new methodologies or the improvement of current ones are rather relevant; intangible aspects of poverty start to deserve attention calling for new definitions; there is evidence of under researched geographical areas, thereby calling for new empirical works that expand the geographical scope.
Multidimensional poverty: an analysis of definitions, measurement tools, applications and their evolution over time through a systematic review of the literature up to 2019 · 2023 · DOISSA as a whole performed well in child poverty indicators from 2000 to 2015; however, consideration of the period from 2015 to 2018 suggests that much remains to be done to lift every child out of poverty.
In this spirit, I suggest some starting points for strengthening the normative foundations of the SAGE framework, discuss an alternative interpretation of the welfare effects of inequality, propose further work on the “material gain” part of the framework, and and briefly suggest an alternative approach to SAGE’s utility maximizing decision model.
Abstract In this paper, motivated by contradictory evidence on the effect of income on democracy, we investigate the hypothesis that it is income shocks – major income fluctuations relative to the trend – rather than marginal year‐on‐year variation in income levels that lead to non‐trivial changes in the quality of political institutions.
Everyone agrees that many of the poor often fail to benefit from growth in per capita income or output, but there is no agreement on a replacement for GDP as a measure of national welfare.
Kenneth A.ReinertNo Small Hope: Towards the Universal Provision of Basic GoodsOxford University Press, 2018. 277 p. $34.95 · 2019 · DOIWhile South Korea has commonly been credited as the world's fastest growing economy after World War II, multivariate research conducted on the height development of South Koreans remains insufficient, as previous studies were limited to descriptive analysis by exploring broad anthropometric trends.
The Biological Standard of Living in South Korea: Educational status has the largest impact on height of KNHANES cohorts born from the 1950s to 1980s · 2019 · DOIFinally, a review of alternative approaches to constructing household asset indices suggests lack of evidence of superiority for count measures, item response theory, and Mokken scale analysis, but points to evidence-based advantages for multiple correspondence analysis, polychoric PCA and predicted income.
Approaches and Alternatives to the Wealth Index to Measure Socioeconomic Status Using Survey Data: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis · 2019 · DOIThe main objective of this research is to show the effect of democracy level on per capita income among new sample, 21 countries which share a similar coup d??tat experience in their political history, to fulfil the gap in the literature.
Instead of $75,000 could that income level be $85,000, or $65,000? This lack of consensus suggests the possibility that the methodology of the HDI will continue to be contested and that changes will continue to be made.
Since, the literature covered three contradictory findings regarding the main driver of economic growth, an unbalanced panel of dataset running from 1970 to 2012 and spanning 92 (high and low income countries) was adopted to address our research question.
First, the during the period of study needs to be examined in terms of it being complex institutional ensemble characterized by specific pattern of structural selectivity, the inbuilt biases that make each form more accessible to some social groups than others, which reflects and modifies the balance of class forces (Poulantzas, 1978, pp.
The Political Dynamics of Social Security Policy in Thailand before 1990 · 2016However, the official poverty measure (OPM) does not account for the effect of near-cash transfers on the financial resources available to families, an important omission since such transfers have become an increasingly important part of government anti-poverty policy.
We address this gap in the literature by applying GIS operations to Demographic and Health Surveys to construct new disaggregated data on welfare and socioeconomic inequalities between and within subnational regions in 22 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Likewise, recent quantitative research on welfare in Latin America, which often uses combined social insurance and social assistance expenditure data, does not sufficiently disaggregate spending to isolate the opposite trends of social insurance retrenchment and social insurance expansion, leading to contradictory results in this literature.
Because of lack of data on capital depreciation, NNI estimates are not available for Hungary and Poland: based on values of their “gross” national income per capita (USD 14 000 and USD 11 000, respectively, in 2003), both countries would however appear to belong to the low half of the income range between USD 10 000 and 20 000 shown in Figure GE1.
The cost of 250 food, water and decent shelter, for instance, can vary widely not only from country to country, but also within countries, especially between rural and urban areas.
Most-cited papers in Income, Poverty, and Inequality
- Measuring Income Inequality Across Countries and Over Time: The Standardized World Income Inequality Database · Social Science Quarterly · 2020 · 753 citations
- Poverty, inequality and COVID-19: the forgotten vulnerable · Public Health · 2020 · 701 citations
- Social Capital and Successful Development among At-Risk Youth · Journal of Marriage and the Family · 1995 · 398 citations
- Measuring living standards with proxy variables · Demography · 2000 · 384 citations
- The Effects of Poverty on Child Health and Development · Annual Review of Public Health · 1997 · 363 citations
- Construction of an adaptable European transnational ecological deprivation index: the French version · Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health · 2012 · 305 citations
- Economic Openness, Democracy, and Income Inequality · Comparative Political Studies · 2003 · 299 citations
- What Remains of Cross-Country Convergence? · Journal of Economic Literature · 2020 · 232 citations
- The Impact of Cash Transfers: A Review of the Evidence from Low- and Middle-income Countries · Journal of Social Policy · 2018 · 227 citations
- What Do We Know about Global Income Inequality? · Journal of Economic Literature · 2008 · 214 citations
Most recent work
- Minimum wages, household inequality, and predistributive patterns in Latin America · The Economic and Labour Relations Review · 2026
- Intra‐Couple Wealth Inequality in South Africa · South African Journal of Economics · 2026
- Can Education Reduce Inequality? Unraveling Indonesia’s Human Development Paradox · Ikonomičeski izsledvaniâ · 2026
- Poverty in Social Science Research: Different Operationalizations, Different Results · Human Affairs · 2026
- Household Consumption and Welfare in India: Evaluating the Distributional Effects of Economic Reforms · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- Small Area Estimation of Child Multidimensional Poverty in Nigeria: A Linear SAE Approximation Using MICS 2021 and WorldPop 2020 Data · Mikailalsys Journal of Mathematics and Statistics · 2026
- An axiomatic approach to the measurement of inequality of opportunity · Economic Theory · 2026
- Reframing poverty measurement in Latin America: methodological architecture, regional patterns, and analytical implications of the Latin America multidimensional poverty index · Sustainable Social Development · 2026
- Human development disparities and their determinants evidence from household level data · Discover Global Society · 2026
- Education Expenditure Composition, Educational Quality, and Income Inequality: Evidence from 13 OECD Countries · Economies · 2026
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