The globalization of economic relations is posing numerous new challenges to policymakers at national and international levels. The reformulation of policy to address the rapidly changing nature, patterns, and causes of social disadvantage is, however, not well advanced. There is a need for new ap-proaches to social issues which frame analysis and policy design in a way which takes into account of globalization and which does not separate the economic from the social. With this objective in view, the ILO's International Institute for Labour Stud-ies has carried out a research project on social exclusion. This work has resulted in a series of publications describing and analysing trends, within developing countries and countries in transition, in terms of patterns and processes of social exclusion of individuals and groups from sources of live-lihood and from citizenship rights.

This book is part of this series. It is a report on a "Policy Forum" which the IILS organized in the United Nations headquarters in New York, as the closing event of its project on social exclusion. The meeting tried to bring together social scientists and practitioners to clarify the relationships be-tween poverty and social exclusion, and examine the implications of this latter concept for the design of anti-poverty strategies. The agenda was build around the idea of the applicability of the social exclusion perspective out-side Western Europe and its implications in terms of social policy, including the effects of globalization.

This book has three parts. The first part deals with the empirical findings of the country case studies made available to participants in the forum. The second is a report on the debates and panel discussions. The last part includes a selection of presentations covering the different aspects of social exclusion which were examined in the meeting. Some of the selected presentations address the more general issue of the relations between poverty and social exclusion. Other are more specific and explore the meaning of social exclusion in the context of markets and other social institutions, citizenship rights and agency.