In this talk, Dr Aya Abe will describe how Japan “discovered” the problem of child poverty and how social science informed policymakers. Then, Dr David Gordon will discuss the UK’s experience of child poverty, its anti-poverty policies, and some of the lessons that have been learned from poverty research.

Date: Tuesday 23 March 2021

UK Time: 12:00pm-1:00pm (GMT)
Japan Time: 9:00pm-10:00pm (GMT+9)

About the contributors

Dr David Gordon is the Director of the Bristol Poverty Institute and the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research at the University of Bristol. The Townsend Centre is dedicated to multi-disciplinary research on poverty in both the industrialised and developing world. The Centre was established by the University of Bristol in response to the United Nations First International Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (1997-2006) and in recognition of the work of Professor Peter Townsend. Dr Gordon has published widely on social and distributional justice, social harm, the scientific measurement of poverty, child poverty and human rights, childhood disability, crime and poverty, area-based anti-poverty measures, the causal effects of poverty on ill health, and rural poverty.

Dr Aya Abe is the Director of The Research Centre for Child and Adolescent Poverty at Tokyo Metropolitan University. She received a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and a B.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After a 16-year career at the National Institute of Population & Social Security Research, a governmental research institute, she moved to teach public policy at Tokyo Metropolitan University. Her 2008 book entitled Child Poverty: Re-examining Japan’s Inequality was widely acclaimed as the first book in Japan which focuses on child poverty in the country. In 2015, she established the Centre for Research on Child and Adolescent Poverty at the university, which is the first research centre in Japan dedicated to poverty research.

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