How useful is the concept of social inclusion when applied to rural older people in the UK and the US?

Abstract

This paper explores the now widespread use of the concept 'social exclusion' in the UK and examines why discourses of social exclusion have not been used in the US. The relationship between social exclusion and poverty is critically applied to rural older people, a group only recently appearing in debates about social exclusion in the UK. Despite the extensive debates about social exclusion in the UK, we show that state provided income programmes are crucial to reducing poverty among older people and that data to indicate progress on addressing any of the more relational aspects of social exclusion are largely insufficient.