Implications of Micro-Level Fractal Poverty Traps on Poverty Reduction Strategies at Meso and Macro Levels

Abstract

Poverty, particularly in developing countries, is endemic and has attained a crisis stage. It is compounded by conflicts, corrupt/inefficient governments and other manmade issues that seem to keep people in perpetual deprivation and want. Although serious, this poverty trap is fixable. This paper reports on an ongoing research about poverty reduction strategies. It is based on the proposition that the first step in poverty reduction is understanding what makes an agent trapped. Therefore, this paper conceptualises poverty traps as fractal, self-perpetuating conditions when individuals are caught in a vicious cycle of poverty and continue to suffer from undesirable hardships for a long period of time. Using the neo-classical economic development theory and data obtained from the United Nations Development Programme, this paper argues that current poverty reduction strategies, which have been in use over the last five decades, have been ineffective. From the experiences of one of the authors in poverty reduction over the last two decades, a new poverty reduction strategy that focuses on individuals is thus proposed. This strategy uses the synergetic concept that indicates the simultaneous causation of poverty through the interaction between the individual and the context. This paper demonstrates that individuals in poverty are caught between externalisation and internalisation of conditions that are nonetheless transient and removable. Based on this new understanding, a four-stage interactive model called Learn, Relate and Adapt (LERA) is proposed for use in poverty research and the poverty reduction implementation strategy.

Keywords/Phrases: poverty, fractal poverty, neo-classical economic development model, synergetics, LERA Model