Measuring & Analyzing Poverty
Most countries define a national poverty line, defined as the minimum income needed to survive. Since there are general implications of the need for State support for those who fall below the poverty line, the way it is defined can be contentious and subject to manipulation. There are of course many other ways of measuring poverty, one that is widely used for cross-country comparisons being the UNDP Human Development Index (HDI), which combines life expectancy, education, and income. A more comprehensive measurement is the Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index (MPI) developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and launched in 2010 with the support of the UNDP.
SDC understands poverty as a multifaceted phenomenon encompassing economic, human, political, socio-cultural, and protective aspects – with gender being a cross-cutting issue. Globally, a woman is more likely to be poor than a man. The multi-faceted definition of poverty shows that being poor touches all aspects of life, undermining human dignity and well-being. It also underlines the fact that money alone does not necessarily release people from poverty.
Poverty has a spatial element, in that people living in particular geographical areas – often remote, poorly supplied with basic services and agriculturally unproductive – can be caught in spatial poverty traps.
Poverty also has a temporal element. For some people, being poor it is a temporary situation caused by factors beyond their control, from which they believe it is possible to escape. For other people, being poor is a fact of life, a chronic situation that they cannot envisage ever being able to escape; indeed, the structural factors keeping them in poverty may be beyond their influence to change. Such people are often defined as those living in chronic, absolute, or extreme poverty. Generally, it is considered a greater challenge to design interventions that reach people who are chronically poor.
RESOURCES
Rural Poverty Reduction in Afghanistan – the need to re-emphasise the multidimensionality of poverty
Tania Rohrer, November 2012
By tracing rural livelihoods of Afghan rural households1, researchers of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit discovered that even though many of households have experienced improvements in access to basic services in the last decade, livelihood security has declined for the majority. Most households are poorer now than they were at the start of the decade. Read more »
International indices: confusing or clarifying the poverty debate? The Human Development Index and other ways of quantifying difference in achieving human potential
Jane Carter, April 2013
The 2012 figures for UNDP’s International Human Development Index came out on 14 March 2013 and made front page news in the English newspapers in Bangladesh. “Bangladesh ahead of India in some areas” championed one paper. Some positive news was certainly needed, given that other reports in the same paper covered violent anti-government clashes, school pupils falling behind in their studies due to the numerous all-day strikes, and acid attacks on women. But on what are the HDI figures based, from what data are they sourced, and what alternative indices exist? Read more »
The World Bank’s new poverty focus: A radical change or “more of the same”?
Jane Carter, April 2013
The World Bank gained a new President a year ago this month, an American-Korean medical doctor and anthropologist, Dr Jim Yong Kim (1). One year into his presidency, he has announced a new World Bank approach to global poverty (2). It aims “to galvanize international and national support around two goals: to virtually end extreme poverty in a generation and to push for greater equity.” Also announced is the introduction of a new “Shared Prosperity Indicator”, although the details of how this will be calculated are not yet available on the Bank’s website. What, then, is new – or is it really new? Read more »
