A poverty line helps focus the attention of governments and civil society on the living conditions of the poor. This paper offers a critical overview of alternative approaches to setting poverty lines. In reviewing the methods found in practice, the paper tries to throw light on, and go some way toward resolving, ongoing debates about poverty measurement, emphasizing those debates which would appear to have greatest bearing on policy discussions.

Poverty is a pressing and persistent problem. While its extent varies across countries, its presence always represents the diminution of human capacity. Therefore, it seems natural to want to do something about it. Have countries made progress in mitigating poverty? How do we determine who is poor and who is not poor? What intuitions or theories guide the design of anti-poverty policy? Is overall labor market performance the key to keeping the poverty rate low? Or, does it matter how well-connected an individual is to those who know about the availability of jobs? Does being an immigrant increase the odds of being poor? Are there anti-poverty policies that work? For whom do they work? If I'm poor, will I have access to health care and housing? Am I more likely to be obese, polluted upon, incarcerated, un-banked, and without assets if I'm poor? Is poverty too hard a problem for economic analysis? These are some of the questions that a distinguished group of scholars have come together to confront in this Handbook. The Handbook is written in a highly-accessible style that encourages the reader to think critically about poverty. Theories are presented in a rigorous but not overly-technical way; concise and straightforward empirical analyses enlighten key policy issues. The volume has six parts: Poverty in the 21st Century; Labor Market Factors; Poverty Policy; Poverty Dynamics; Dimensions of Poverty; and Trends and Issues in Anti-Poverty Policy. A goal of the Handbook is to stimulate further research on poverty. To that end, several chapters challenge conventional thinking about poverty and in some cases present specific proposals for the reform of economic and social policy.

Reducing rural poverty is a key objective of FAO. To achieve this goal, the Organization must reach the poor and the extremely poor in rural areas, analysing their needs and aspirations and providing effective guidance for the design of policies and investments that foster inclusive and sustainable development. This guide was developed to strengthen the Organization’s work on rural poverty reduction and inclusivity over the coming years. It provides key information to measure poverty, characterize rural populations, and identify their constraints to target them more accurately. The guide includes five chapters. Chapter 1 explains the structure, content, and use of the guide, as well as its intended users and objectives. Chapter 2 discusses how poverty is measured, focusing on the different indicators that can be used, depending on the context, specific circumstances, data availability and policy objectives. Chapter 3 provides guidance on how to build a poverty profile and produce poverty maps to understand who the poor are and where they are located. Chapter 4 focuses on the targeting process, on various targeting techniques and on how to choose one over another to ensure that programmes and projects effectively combat poverty, particularly in rural areas. Finally, Chapter 5 sets the next steps for the development of further analytical guides. The various chapters provide an overview of both widely used and emerging techniques in poverty analysis, focusing on quantitative methods, and giving constant attention to FAO’s areas of work and the challenges posed by operating in rural areas.

This report provides an overview of important urban poverty questions. What defines urban poverty and how is urban poverty being measured? What other factors beyond consumption poverty need to be tackled? Who are the urban poor? What relations exist between urban poverty and city size? What linkages exist between urbanization, income, and urban poverty? What policy responses to urban poverty are implemented in selected Asian countries? The report served as a background study for the International Policy Workshop on Urban Poverty and Inclusive Cities in Asia, organized by the Asian Development Bank and the International Poverty Reduction Center held from 24-25 June 2013 in Suqian, Jiangsu Province, the People's Republic of China.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Detailed analyses of poverty and wellbeing in developing countries, based on household surveys, have been ongoing for more than three decades. The large majority of developing countries now regularly conduct a variety of household surveys, and the information base in developing countries with respect to poverty and wellbeing has improved dramatically. Nevertheless, appropriate measurement of poverty remains complex and controversial. This is particularly true in developing countries where (i) the stakes with respect to poverty reduction are high; (ii) the determinants of living standards are often volatile; and (iii) related information bases, while much improved, are often characterized by significant non-sample error. It also remains, to a surprisingly high degree, an activity undertaken by technical assistance personnel and consultants based in developed countries. This book seeks to enhance the transparency, replicability, and comparability of existing practice. In so doing, it also aims to significantly lower the barriers to entry to the conduct of rigorous poverty measurement and increase the participation of analysts from developing countries in their own poverty assessments. The book focuses on two domains: the measurement of absolute consumption poverty and a first order dominance approach to multidimensional welfare analysis. In each domain, it provides a series of flexible computer codes designed to facilitate analysis by allowing the analyst to start from a flexible and known base. The book volume covers the theoretical grounding for the code streams provided, a chapter on 'estimation in practice', a series of 11 case studies where the code streams are operationalized, as well as a synthesis, an extension to inequality, and a look forward.

Covering global, comparative, and single-country contexts, this Research Handbook presents wide-ranging, cutting-edge research on poverty and inequality. It maps out international trends in poverty and inequality and explores the key conceptual and operational frameworks, practical analyses, and policy applications and outcomes.

The article presents the first major update of the international $1 a day poverty line, proposed in World Development Report 1990: Poverty for measuring absolute poverty by the standards of the world's poorest countries. In a new and more representative data set of national poverty lines, a marked economic gradient emerges only when consumption per person is above about $2.00 a day at 2005 purchasing power parity. Below this, the average poverty line is $1.25, which is proposed as the new international poverty line. The article tests the robustness of this line to alternative estimation methods and explains how it differs from the old $1 a day line.

The World Bank Group has two overarching goals: End extreme poverty by 2030 and promote shared prosperity by boosting the incomes of the bottom 40 percent of the population in each economy. As this year’s Poverty and Shared Prosperity report documents, the world continues to make progress toward these goals. In 2015, approximately one-tenth of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, and the incomes of the bottom 40 percent rose in 77 percent of economies studied. But success cannot be taken for granted. Poverty remains high in Sub- Saharan Africa, as well as in fragile and conflict-affected states. At the same time, most of the world’s poor now live in middle-income countries, which tend to have higher national poverty lines. This year’s report tracks poverty comparisons at two higher poverty thresholds—$3.20 and $5.50 per day—which are typical of standards in lower- and upper-middle-income countries. In addition, the report introduces a societal poverty line based on each economy’s median income or consumption. Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle also recognizes that poverty is not only about income and consumption—and it introduces a multidimensional poverty measure that adds other factors, such as access to education, electricity, drinking water, and sanitation. It also explores how inequality within households could affect the global profile of the poor. All these additional pieces enrich our understanding of the poverty puzzle, bringing us closer to solving it. For more information, please visit worldbank.org/PSP

Although most traditional economic theory puts the individual at the centre of analysis, more recent approaches have acknowledged the importance of a wider sense of identity as a determinant of individual behaviour. Whether it is ethnicity, religion or gender, group membership is a central part of human life. This book presents new advances in areas which consider both the individual and the group when measuring inequalities and well-being. The first part of the book covers topics such as relative deprivation and happiness, domains where even economists have now recognized the importance of reference groups in the assessment of individuals’ well-being. The second part is devoted to the concept of polarization, a growing field of inquiry among economists. The third part looks at income and wage intra-generational mobility, while the fourth part reports on recent advances in measuring the significant differences between and within groups. The book concludes with several chapters devoted to poverty and social exclusion, stressing in particular the need for a multidimensional approach to these topics. This collection offers a fresh look at the way individual well-being should be measured, by emphasizing the role of reference groups and the idea of polarization, as well as stressing the impact on well-being of changes over time to the relative position of individuals. This book should be of interest to graduate students and researchers working in the field of development economics, inequality and poverty.

This book offers a holistic view of Julio Boltvinik’s vast and important work on poverty conceptualisation and measurement. While well known to Spanish-speaking audiences, this volume brings these works together to offer access for English-speaking audiences for the first time. The book provides the foundations, application and empirical examples of Boltvinik’s Integrated Poverty Measurement Method, which could potentially transform poverty narratives globally as it has done in Mexico. Deeply critical of available poverty approaches, it provides a challenging and radically new way of conceiving and measuring poverty, offering the only multidimensional poverty measurement method which includes time poverty and allows all Aggregate Poverty Measures to be fully calculated.