Poverty Defined
Poverty is understood in many senses. The main understandings of the term is that poverty in this sense may be understood as the deprivation of essential goods and services.
Poverty is an economic condition of lacking both money and basic necessities needed to successfully live such as food, water, education, and shelter.
In the sense of social need, it includes social exclusion, dependency, and the ability to participate in society. This would include education and information. Social exclusion is usually distinguished from poverty, as it encompasses political and moral issues, and is not restrained to the sphere of economics. It is also describes as a lack of sufficient income and wealth. The meaning of “sufficient” varies widely across the different political and economic parts of the world ( 2006).
Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time. Poverty is losing a child to illness brought about by unclean water. Poverty is powerlessness, lack of representation and freedom.
Although the most severe poverty is in the developing world, there is evidence of poverty in every region. In developed countries, this condition results in wandering homeless people and poor suburbs and ghettos. Poverty may be seen as the collective condition of poor people, or of poor groups, and in this sense entire nation-states are sometimes regarded as poor. To avoid stigma these nations are usually called developing nations.
Poverty can also be conceived as absolute or relative, as lack of income or failure to attain capabilities. It can be chronic or temporary, is sometimes closely associated with inequity, and is often correlated with vulnerabilities and social exclusion
Poverty Measured
There are two basic types of distinction that help differentiate families of poverty indicators: means/ends and quantitative/qualitative.
ENDS AND MEANS
The distinction between “means” and “ends” is that the former refers to indicators of inputs intended to achieve an end result, while the latter measures the ultimate out-comes. The fact that certain “means” indicators correspond to measurable “ends” should not be misconstrued to imply that the former are exclusively responsible for latter outcomes.
An advantage of using “means” indicators is that there are many to choose from, whereas the main drawback is that one is necessarily using a proxy, or set of proxies, with varying degrees of correlation to one’s definition of poverty. Although “ends” indicators correlate more closely with the phenomena being measured, they tend to change relatively slowly over time and may not be adequate for purposes of poverty monitoring in the short and medium term. Some may also be very expensive to collect.
QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE
Quantitative and qualitative indicators are sometimes confused with objective and subjective perspectives of poverty. In fact, an objective concept of poverty could be measured with both quantitative and qualitative indicators, and the same applies to subjective approaches.
Quantitative data can be aggregated whereas qualitative information usually cannot. On the other hand, qualitative information may provide a subtler picture of reality than can quantitative data. The income and basic needs concepts of poverty are characterized predominantly by quantitative indicators. The human capability poverty approach utilizes both types of indicators, but may incorporate more qualitative indicators than the income and basic needs approaches. Qualitative indicators dominate the participatory and empowerment approaches to poverty reduction.
The two sets of indicators described above intersect when it comes to measuring poverty. A broad approach to monitoring poverty would draw on all possible sets (means and ends, quantitative and qualitative).
INCOME
A common method used to measure poverty is based on incomes or consumption levels. Poverty measurement has been dominated by the so-called income approach. This approach to poverty measurement assumes that individuals and households are poor if their income or consumption falls below a certain threshold, usually defined as a minimum, socially acceptable level of well being by a population group. A person is considered poor if his or her consumption or income level falls below some minimum level necessary to meet basic needs. This minimum level is usually called the “poverty line”
In the absence of household survey data, income poverty is sometimes measured in per capita GNP terms. But this latter indicator is a very crude measure and can often be misleading, thus, per capital personal income is a preferable aggregate income indicator.
BASIC NEEDS
The basic needs concept of poverty takes the income approach one step further. This approach attempts to address some of the limitations of the income indicator family by distinguishing between private income, publicly provided services and different forms of nonmonetary “income.” The basic needs approach to poverty measurement includes access to such necessities as food, shelter, schooling, health services, potable water and sanitation facilities, employment opportunities, and even touches on opportunities for community participation. Basic needs indicators are often classified in the “means” category. However, since they are one step closer to outcomes than income measures, they are sometimes placed in a category of their own—“indirect ends.”
Basic needs indicators add a wide range of dimensions to income measures. For example, a rise in housing or essential transport costs would be counted as a decline in well being using basic needs indicators, while per capita GNP would record this as an increase.
HUMAN CAPABILITY
The human capability approach to poverty measurement attempts to measure poverty in terms of outcomes or “ends.” This approach defines the phenomena as the absence of basic human capabilities to function at a minimally acceptable level within a society. An emphasis is placed on people’s abilities and opportunities to enjoy long, healthy lives, to be literate and to participate freely in their society.
Most capability poverty indicators are straightforward: life expectancy, literacy rates, malnutrition, etc. The biggest advantage of capability indicators, as a whole, is that they measure well being in terms of final outcomes rather than as proxies for those outcomes. In addition, many of them are considered mainstream in terms of national statistics, so data is often available.
The main disadvantages are similar to those of the basic needs group. There are no perfect aggregates for this family of indicators and they are expressed in terms with varying degrees of familiarity. In addition, some capability indicators are group measures and cannot be used to gauge household or individual well being. Furthermore, some of the capability indicators are stock variables, which change slowly over time, thus limiting their usefulness for short- and medium-term poverty monitoring.
References:
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment