The Definition and Measurement of Poverty

Journal of Social Policy, 2003

The Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey of Britain made it possible first time to explore poverty using three different measures applied at the same time on the same sample. The measures were: lacking socially perceived necessities; being subjectively poor and having a relatively low income. These approaches are all commonly used to identify the poor and to measure poverty but rarely if ever in combination. In this article we have found that there is little overlap in the group of people defined as poor by these dimensions. There are reasons for this lack of overlap, connected to the reliability and validity of the different measures. However the people who are defined as living in poverty by different measures of poverty are different. This inevitably means that the policy response to poverty will be different depending on which measure is employed.

2000

1977

Journal of Social and Political Sciences, 2019

How we talk about poverty and low income is complicated by the competing methods for defining and measuring the phenomenon. In this article, I present a brief summary of the dominant methods currently in use by the governments of Canada and USA, and by the World Bank and large NGOs: absolute vs relative measures, low income cut-off (LICO), official poverty measure (OPM), global poverty line (GPL), human poverty index (HPI), and the multidimensional poverty index (MPI).

2000

In this paper we attempt to contribute to the growing literature on the mismatch observed when comparing income and deprivation measures of poverty through an analysis of the first two waves of the European Community Household Panel Study.

Handbook of Income Inequality Measurement, 1999

This paper explores the relationship between inequality, poverty and welfare. Several of the well-known poverty measures have shown to be in conflict with the social welfare objective of society. Despite the fact that a considerable literature on poverty measurement has grown since 1976, there does not exist a single poverty measure that could be considered to be perfect. This paper concludes that we base our empirical work upon several poverty measures that are at least consistent with the society's twin objectives of increasing social welfare and reducing poverty. * I am grateful to Peter Lambert for his helpful comments.

1996

The aim of this paper is twofold. The first is to illustrate that a poverty index can be derived from a decomposition of an appropriate inequality index. The advantage of decomposing an inequality index is that the decomposition supplies additional information that is useful for poverty measurement. The second purpose is to illustrate the kind of policy analysis that can be performed with a decomposed inequality index by decomposing the Gini coefficient into Sen's poverty index and other components. The methodology suggests an answer to the following question: Assume that a tax has been imposed on an expenditure item or an income source, what will be the impact on the components of the inequality index? The analysis is performed with data from Romania. D 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. 0176-2680/02/$ -see front matter D 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. PII: S 0 1 7 6 -2 6 8 0 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 6 9 -6 www.elsevier.com/locate/econbase *

2002

A key finding of recent poverty research is that there is a significant mismatch between poverty measured using an income approach and poverty measured directly in terms of observed deprivation or other indicators of unacceptably low living standards. The mismatch is substantial and is typically in the range of 50% to 60%. This paper takes this mismatch as a springboard for discussion on the conceptualisation and measurement of poverty. A key purpose of the paper is to identify the relevant international literature and report on some of the findings, including some comparisons for New Zealand using data from the 2000 Living Standards Survey. The findings are set out in the context of a general framework for understanding the mismatch and lead to a discussion of the implications for the conceptualising and measurement of poverty, and for reporting on poverty trends. The paper advocates the use of a suite of measures rather than a single measure to better capture the multi-dimensional nature and complexity of poverty, and especially to assist with the understanding of the factors and processes that contribute to the exclusion of citizens from a minimum acceptable way of life in their own society because of inadequate resources.

2007

2000

2000

In this paper we attempt to contribute to the growing literature on the mismatch observed when comparing income and deprivation measures of poverty through an analysis of the first two waves of the European Community Household Panel Study. We do so by developing for each country measures of point in time income poverty, persistent income poverty and consistent poverty involving both low income and a corresponding level of deprivation. Our analysis shows that the mismatch between income and deprivation measures is greatest at the least generously defined poverty lines. A similar relationship was found for persistence. But, while consistency was related to the overall level of poverty in a country, this was not true for persistence. To develop further our understanding of different poverty measures the relationship of these variables to economic strain is considered. While deprivation has a substantially stronger impact than income a significant interaction between the two factors is ...

2013

Poverty is an undesirable and intolerable state of affairs which is considered as a social, economic, political or psychological problem. The word suggests that individuals or groups who are in poverty have to be helped to change their conditions. The reduction or eradication (if possible) of this poverty problem has now become the primary focus of the socio-economic development polices of developing world governments. There is therefore the need to have a yardstick to identify the poor, tools to measure the depth of their poverty which will then assist policy makers to assess their policy impact. This paper which forms part of a literature search and review of poverty for the author’s PhD Thesis attempts to do just that. It first puts poverty in context and considers it as the absence of well-being. It explains the phenomenon and thereafter provides analysis of a wide range of measurements both qualitative and quantitative. How to use these measurements are then explained.

Review of Income and Wealth, 1985

Kuwait chapter of Arabian Journal of Business & Management Review, 2012

Many poverty authors point out that the various ways poverty is conceptualized and measured are very crucial because different poverty measures tend to capture different people as poor. The main focus of this research is to review the theoretical and empirical research on theories of poverty, poverty measures and outcomes. Subsequently, we discuss conceptual framework of the different poverty measures.