Below are highlights of the chapters, followed by the table of contents and more detailed chapter summaries below:

• The overview chapter reviews the leading disciplinary approaches to examining mobility and employs an empowerment framework to draw together findings from across the book about the trends, factors and processes which are shaping poor people’s mobility.
• A theoretical chapter examines the importance of social group differences and uneven power relations to mobility processes, and specifies the varied resources and mechanisms which underpin social exclusion, inequality and the hurdles to more numerous exits from poverty.
• Two chapters critically examine the recent mobility literature which employs panel datasets, one comparing leading mobility trends and factors among the developing countries and another among the industrial countries.
• Three chapters span generations and focus on communities -- providing accounts of 50-years of transformations in two villages in South India, and 25 years of change affecting three shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and 178 villages across three states of India. Another chapter details the importance of families and communities in the lives of a struggling street child of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and an extremely poor family from Cuzco, Peru.
• The final chapters examine the importance of migration to poverty escapes in Latin America, with one focusing on the difficult but hopeful journeys of Mayan Indians from Guatemala to the United States and their continued support back home.

Chapter 1: Agency, Opportunity Structure and Poverty Escapes (summary)
Deepa Narayan and Patti Petesch

Chapter 2: Poverty and the Politics of Exclusion (summary)
Charles Tilly

Chapter 3: Moving On, Staying Behind, Getting Lost: Lessons on Poverty Mobility from Longitudinal Data (summary)
Stefan Dercon and Joseph S. Shapiro

Chapter 4: Intragenerational Income Mobility: Poverty Dynamics in Industrial Societies (summary)
Brian Nolan and Robert Erikson

Chapter 5: Escaping Poverty and Becoming Poor in Three States of India, with Additional Evidence from Kenya, Uganda and Peru (summary)
Anirudh Krishna

Chapter 6: Poverty, Caste and Migration in South India (summary)
T. Scarlett Epstein

Chapter 7: Elusive Pathways Out of Poverty: Intra- and Intergenerational Mobility in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro (summary)
Janice E. Perlman

Chapter 8: Resisting Extreme Poverty: Learning from Families in Burkina Faso and Peru (summary)
Xavier Godinot, Claude Heyberger, Patricia Heyberger, Marco Ugarte, and Rosario Ugarte

Chapter 9: Moving Away from Poverty: Migrant Remittances, Livelihoods and Development (summary)
Anthony L. Hall

Chapter 10: Migration, Remittances and Ethnic Identity: The Experience of Guatemalan Maya in the United States (summary)
Shelton Davis