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Poverty is the opposite of well-being. It means not just a lack of money or goods, but encompasses a multi-dimensional reality including insecurity, vulnerability, powerlessness, and social exclusion. Despite widespread recognition of multiple deprivations, the need for simple targets and indicators makes income poverty more prominent than other dimensions. The history of the fight against poverty shows a mixed picture. On the one hand income poverty has fallen faster in the past 50 years than in the previous 500 years. On the other hand, the number of people still living in poverty is unacceptably high. Over 1 billion people live in absolute poverty on less than US$ 1 a day. Almost half of humankind (3 billion people) live on less than US$ 2 a day.
Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not being able to go 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.
Poverty has many faces, changing from place to place and across time, and has been described in many ways. Most often, poverty is a situation people want to escape. So poverty is a call to action -- for the poor and the wealthy alike -- a call to change the world so that many more may have enough to eat, adequate shelter, access to education and health, protection from violence, and a voice in what happens in their communities.
DIMENSIONS OF POVERTY
To know what helps to alleviate poverty, what works and what does not, what changes over time, poverty has to be defined, measured, and studied -- and even lived. As poverty has many dimensions, it has to be looked at through a variety of indicators -- levels of income and consumption, social indicators, and now increasingly indicators of vulnerability to risks and of socio/political access. So far, much more work has been done using consumption or income-based measures of poverty. But some work has been done on non-income dimensions of poverty.
MEASURING POVERTY
The most commonly used way to measure poverty is based on incomes or consumption levels. 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". What is necessary to satisfy basic needs varies across time and societies. Therefore, poverty lines vary in time and place, and each country uses lines, which are appropriate to its level of development, societal norms and values.
Information on consumption and income is obtained through sample surveys, during which households are asked to answer detailed questions on there spending habits and sources of income. Such surveys are conducted more or less regularly in most countries. These sample survey data collection methods are increasingly being complemented by participatory methods, where people are asked what their basic needs are and what poverty means for them. Interestingly, new research shows a high degree of concordance between poverty lines based on objective and subjective assessments of needs.
When estimating poverty worldwide, the same reference poverty line has to be used, and expressed in a common unit across countries. Therefore, for the purpose of global aggregation and comparison, countries used reference lines set at $1 and $2 per day in 1993 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms (where PPPs measure the relative purchasing power of currencies across countries). It has been estimated that in 1998 1.2 billion people world-wide had consumption levels below $1 a day -- 24 percent of the population of the developing world and 2.8 billion lived on less than $2 a day. These figures are lower than earlier estimates, indicating that some progress has taken place, but they still remain too high in terms of human suffering, and much more remains to be done.
NEW DIRECTIONS IN POVERTY MEASUREMENT
While much progress has been made in measuring and analyzing income poverty, efforts are needed to measure and study the many other dimensions of poverty. Work on non-income dimensions of poverty -- defining indicators where needed, gathering data, assessing trend. The agenda includes assembling comparable and high-quality social indicators for education, health, access to services and infrastructure. It also includes developing new indicators to track other dimensions -- for example risk, vulnerability, social exclusion, access to social capital -- as well as ways to compare a multi-dimensional conception of poverty, when it may not make sense to aggregate the various dimensions into one index.
In addition to expanding the range of indicators of poverty, work is needed to integrate data coming from sample surveys with information obtained through more participatory techniques, which usually offer rich insights into why programs work or do not. Participatory approaches illustrate the nature of risk and vulnerability, how cultural factors and ethnicity interact and affect poverty, how social exclusion sets limits to people’s participation in development, and how barriers to such participation can be removed.
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Writer Profile
aneel SALMAN
aneel SALMAN Lecturer, Dept of Economics Forman Christian University, Pakistan. Currently a Fulbright Scholar, pursuing PhD in Economics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) Troy, NY USA 12180-3590 Email: aneelsalman@yahoo.com
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Comments
Great job John | Mar 25th, 2003
great job
Very true Bash Balogun | Jun 16th, 2003
I completely agree with you, and I hope those in authority get a full understanding of this.
Good job.
It is Good Madan Paudel | Jul 4th, 2003
The issues you raised is very good.Keep it up.With best Regards
Madan
paudelmadan@hotmail.com
graet job aneel ImranAmeen Khan | Oct 6th, 2003
assalam o alaikum aneel
i m really glad to see ur comments specially on Pakistan, as a patriot Pakistani we should join hands together to keep our country from developing to a developed country,i fully agree with ur views, as i have no time so far to write an article, but i wish u write more about the other burning issues of Pakistan. keep in touch aneel
regards.
imran.
Allah Hafiz
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