the conventional view is insufficient and potentially misleading because it decontextualizes poverty and obscures its origins and mechanisms of reproduction over time and across countries and regions in minimally complex market economies exclusion from local or international markets is normally not the cause but rather a consequence of poverty in these economies poverty tends to be created by the manner in which specific social groups are integrated into the dominant mode of social and economic reproduction it is their modalities of economic and social integration that impose upon the poor highly exploitative labour regimes including badly paid wage labour precarious commodity production insecure selfemployment and potentially degrading forms of labour such as child labour in turn these labour regimes are associated with low productivity low incomes and precarious living standards