Poverty measurement - stakes of the various methods

Abstract

For years, the definition of poverty has evolved. There is actually a general agreement on the existence of an absolute core of minimum living, and on the fact that more money can enable someone to escape poverty. Poverty can be defined as unmet basic needs, including food and non food items, or the inability to obtain adequate food and other basic necessities, focusing on material deprivations. At that point, the difficulty is to find a way to measure poverty. Indeed, working on poverty studies is essential. On the basis of the measurement of poverty, national and international policies are implemented. Moreover, the efficiency of these policies, especially the national policies, can be assessed. To tackle these issues, the methods to measure poverty should reflect as much as they can the reality of poverty in a country, and still be comparable with the previous assessment. Another issue is to find a way to get a comparable measure of poverty across countries, to implement international policies. A perfect measurement of poverty would satisfy the three principles: to be representative of the reality, comparable across countries and comparable with previous data. We will first make a review of the different methods, give the pros and cons for a better assessment of poverty, and point out the current debate they father. The following areas of measuring poverty will be examined: - survey methods - tools used to analysed : poverty line, unmet basic needs method, poverty ratios, Integrated Poverty Measure (IPM) Then, we will examine the reality today: How the countries measure poverty in practice? We will have a look to the disparities of the method used, and try to find a relevant international poverty line, enabling comparability across countries. Finally, focusing on the example of India, we will discuss the comparability with previous data in a particular country.