Does childhood poverty lead to adult poverty? Evidence shows childhood is a sensitive period for developing cognition, physical vitality and personality. This is traceable to specific behavioural and biological mechanisms. However such science could easily drive overdeterministic views about how childhood affects later life. The paper therefore discusses how damage from childhood poverty can-at least sometimes and partially-be resisted or reversed, both during childhood and in adulthood. As people reach biological maturity, alterations to their developmental trajectories rely increasingly on alterations in behavioural relationships. Opportunities remain vital throughout life for sustained socioeconomic attainment.

Recent panel data sets suggest that in some places perhaps half of the poor are not poor all the time, and also as much as 80 percent of "poverty severity" may be due to large fluctuations through time. Some of these dynamics are due to life-cycle events, but much of it represents "damaging fluctuations." These cause immediate damage, and may trigger responses leading to chronic poverty or intergenerational poverty. Moreover, just the possibility of damaging fluctuations, even if they do not occur, may generate more risk-averse behavior, which hampers growth and (because it is more likely to be common among poorer people) increases inequality. The paper discusses the concept of damaging fluctuations, contrasting it with the more common, and related, terms of "risk" and "shocks." Six categories of damaging fluctuations are identified: disease or injury, violence, natural disaster, harvest failure, terms-of-trade deterioration, and reduced access to income-earning work. The paper presents evidence of how the poor differ from others in their exposure, vulnerability, and aversion to damaging fluctuations, and how these lead to more poverty.

This paper explores links between migration and poverty, and their implications for social policy. It argues that research on linkages between migration and poverty can, and should, start with knowledge about poverty itself: what it is, what causes it, what reduces it, poor people's agency as well as constraints, and so on. Poverty research offers several established understandings on the natures, structures and processes driving poverty, and these should be central to how the issues are framed in migration research and policy. We argue that context-dependency rather than generalized conclusions are the main way forward. This could help develop migration research that is more strongly poor-centric, and consequently, move migration debates and policies toward issues more favourable and relevant to the poor.

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