Poverty, vulnerability and Covid‐19: Introduction and overview

• Published date: 01 November 2021
• Author: Peter F. Lanjouw,Finn Tarp
• Date: 01 November 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/rode.12844

Rev Dev Econ. 2021;25:1797–1802. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/rode

|

1797

The collection of articles in this symposium issue speaks to the issue of poverty dynamics and

vulnerability during an unusual, unexpected and damaging global pandemic. One way to think

of the present Covid- 19 crisis is that it turns the immediate policy challenge regarding poverty

reduction on its head. In the decades prior to the Covid- 19 pandemic, attention had tended to

focus on the challenge of sustaining, and possibly accelerating, poverty reduction against a back-

ground of economic growth and broadly rising living standards. In contrast, the current crisis

and the likely post- crisis economic trajectory of most countries present policy- makers with the

imperative of formulating and implementing measures to reverse, or at least attenuate, massive

increases in the numbers of poor people living below the poverty line.

When the UN set the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, it was widely appreci-

ated by the global development community that ending poverty by 2030 was a highly aspirational

objective. Of the approximately 700 million people who at the time were living below the inter-

national extreme poverty line, most lived in fragile and conflict- affected states. Thus, it was clear

that achieving the SDGs would require different approaches and strategies.

The onset of the Covid- 19 pandemic added a great deal of further complexity. Historically,

the orientation of, for example, the World Bank’s Poverty Assessments had typically been on

the evolution of poverty in a context of economic growth and general economic development.

Received: 8 October 2021

|

Accepted: 9 October 2021

DOI: 10.1111/rode.12844

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Poverty, vulnerability and Covid- 19:

Introduction and overview

Peter F.Lanjouw1

|

FinnTarp2

1School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands

2Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Correspondence

Finn Tarp, Department of Economics,

University of Copenhagen, Øster

Farimagsgade 5, building 26 DK- 1353

Copenhagen K, Denmark.

Email: finn.Tarp@econ.ku.dk

Funding information

UK Foreign, Commonwealth and

Development Office (FCDO)

Abstract

This symposium issue speaks to the topic of poverty dy-

namics and vulnerability during an unusual, unexpected

and damaging global pandemic. We provide here an in-

troduction and overview to the symposium.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial License, which permits use,

distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

© 2021 The Authors. Review of Development Economics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.