Paul Spicker is Grampian Chair of Public Policy at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, and Director of the Centre for Public Policy and Management. He has worked as a consultant for a range of agencies in social welfare provision. His research includes studies of poverty, need, disadvantage, and service delivery and he has published twelve books and over sixty academic papers in this field. His most recent title is Policy Analysis for Practice (2006).Sonia Alvarez Leguizamón is Associate Professor of Urban Anthropology in the Faculty of Humanities, National University of Salta, Argentina. She specializes in social policies, segregation, exclusion, and poverty and history of social policies in Argentina, and has published several articles on these issues.David Gordon is Director of the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research, at the University of Bristol. He has researched and published in the fields of the scientific measurement of poverty, crime and poverty, childhood disability, area-based anti-poverty measures, the causal effects of poverty on ill health, housing policy and rural poverty. He has published extensively in the field, and his latest title is Poverty and Social Exclusion in Britain: The Millennium Survey (2006).

An indispensable guide ... Spicker's final chapter is a masterly review of the subject.

• Introducing the glossary - Else ØyenPoverty: An International GlossaryDefinitions of poverty: twelve clusters of meaning - Paul SpickerContributorsIndex