Changes in Poverty and Vulnerability and Relevant Institution Building in Developing Countries

这项研究项目有两个主要目的。首先，它试图分析当代发展中国家在转型中人们的生活、身体和福利的贫困和脆弱性是如何发生变化的。其次，它旨在设计社会制度框架，以应对新形式的贫困和脆弱性。为此，项目组把重点放在东南亚和撒哈拉以南非洲地区，并在老挝和坦桑尼亚开展了实地工作。它特别关注城市非正规部门中的妇女、儿童、农民、微型、小型或中型企业。通过早期阶段的研究，它开始重视传染病的传播，特别是艾滋病毒/艾滋病、人口增加使生计资源相对稀缺、城市化以及政府的监管和限制，这些都是导致贫困和脆弱性发生变化的主要因素。它还建议将人力资源开发或个人赋权作为减少和克服贫穷和脆弱性的可行渠道。通过经验探索，我们已强烈认识到，各自国家的政府缺乏建立减少贫穷和脆弱性所需的社会机构的能力。这意味着我们将不得不审查这些国家的政府或国家是如何制定的。然而，各国政府的人力资源开发政策，特别是促进教育的措施，是与具体行动和成果相联系的政策之一，因此，在今后有关贫穷和脆弱性的研究中，有必要侧重于上述政策。关于这几点，学术界的知识积累很少，我们把它们作为研究的主题是很有意义的。根据这些发现，希望组织多学科的研究活动。

This research project has two major purposes. Firstly, it tries to analyze how poverty and vulnerability of people's life, body, and welfare have been changing under transformation in contemporary developing countries. Secondly, it aims at designing social institution framework to cope with new forms of poverty and vulnerability. For these purposes, the project team has focused upon Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and has conducted field works in Laos and Tanzania. It has paid special attention to women, children, peasants, micro-, small, or medium-sized enterprises in the urban informal sector. Through earlier stages of research, it came to place importance on spread of infectious diseases, notably HIV/AIDS, population increase making resources for livelihoods relatively more scarce, urbanization, and government's regulation and restriction, as major factors causing changes in poverty and vulnerability. It also proposes human resource development or individual empowerment as a channel viable to reduce and overcome poverty and vulnerability.Through empirical explorations, we have come to recognize strongly that governments in the respective countries lack capacity to build social institutions required to reduce poverty and vulnerability. It implies that we will have to review how governments or states in the countries are formulated. Nevertheless, governments' human resource development policies, especially education promotion measures, are one of those which have been associated with concrete actions and results, and, therefore, it is necessary to focus on the said policies in future studies related to poverty and vulnerability. As with regard to these points, there has been little knowledge accumulation in academia, it is significant for us to have raised them as themes of research. On the basis of these findings, it is desired to organize multi-disciplinary research activities.