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

这个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变化的。第二，它旨在设计社会制度框架，以应对新形式的贫困和脆弱性。为此目的，项目小组把重点放在东南亚和撒哈拉以南非洲，并在老挝和坦桑尼亚进行了实地工作。它特别注意妇女、儿童、农民、城市非正规部门的微型、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，人口增长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，我们强烈认识到，各国政府缺乏建立减少贫困和脆弱性所需的社会制度的能力。这意味着我们将不得不审查这些国家的政府或州是如何形成的。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结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，有必要把重点放在这些政策上。关于这些问题，学术界的知识积累很少，我们将其作为研究主题提出是很有意义的。在这些发现的基础上，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.