Poverty trap is understood differently across disciplines. In the social sciences, the concept, primarily employed at the individual, household or community level, describes a situation in which escaping poverty becomes impossible due to unproductive or inflexible resources. A poverty trap can also be seen as a critical minimum asset threshold, below which families are unable to successfully educate their children, build up their productive assets and get out of poverty. Extreme poverty is itself a poverty trap since poor persons lack the means to participate meaningfully in society. In economics, the term poverty trap is often used at national scales, referring to a self-perpetuating condition where an economy, caught in a vicious cycle, suffers from persistent underdevelopment . Many proposed models of poverty traps are found in the literature.
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Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
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