Types of Poverty

11 Key excerpts on "Types of Poverty"

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  The Poverty of Nations

  • A. Khusro(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  MEASURING CHANGES IN POVERTY IN FIVE DIFFERENT WAYS As there are many dimensions of poverty and many definitions are possi- ble, this study aims at examining various parts of the world on at least five different definitions of poverty: ii(i) absolute poverty, that is the absolute number of poor; i(ii) proportionate poverty, that is the overall percentage of population below a suitably defined poverty line – such as calorie consumption at given levels in different parts of the world; (iii) sectoral poverty, again defined in absolute and proportionate terms as population above or below a pre-defined level of (a) literacy, (b) edu- cation, (c) health etc.; (iv) the poverty or wealth status level of different societies according to a human development index which attempts to sum up the levels of a population in terms of income, education and life expectancy (the latter itself being the resultant of several factors); and i (v) relative poverty which reflects income distribution among different deciles of a population, summed up in such terms as a Lorenz Curve or Gini Coefficient. The estimates, as far as possible, of these alternative measures of poverty are sought from available data for two different points of time a few years apart. This two-points-of-time estimation is undertaken to bring out changes Alternative Definitions 51

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  Poverty

  An International Glossary

  • Paul Spicker, Sonia Alvarez Leguizamón, David Gordon, Paul Spicker, Sonia Alvarez Leguizamón, David Gordon(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Zed Books

    (Publisher)

  Debates on poverty have been bedevilled by an artificial academic formalism, which has insisted that there must be an agreed core of meaning, that contradictory examples showed that certain uses were ‘right’ while others were ‘wrong’, and that disagreement was based not in a difference of interpretation or the focus of concern, but in a failure to understand the true nature of the problem. Poverty does not, however, have a single meaning. It has a series of meanings, linked through a series of resemblances.

  TWELVE DEFINITIONS

  In the social sciences poverty is commonly understood in at least twelve discrete senses. The senses overlap; many of the main protagonists in the debate take two or three positions simultaneously. They are discrete because they can be logically separated, so that circumstances which apply in one sense do not necessarily apply in others.

  POVERTY AS A MATERIAL CONCEPT The first group of definitions concern poverty as a material concept. People are poor because they do not have something they need, or because they lack the resources to get the things they need.

  NEED    The first set of definitions understands poverty as a lack of material goods or services. People ‘need’ things like such as food, clothing, fuel or shelter. Vic George writes:

  poverty consists of a core of basic necessities as well as a list of other necessities that change over time and place. (George 1988 : 208)

  Baratz and Grigsby refer to poverty as

  a severe lack of physical and mental well-being, closely associated with inadequate economic resources and consumption. (Baratz and Grigsby 1971 : 120)

  The factors which go to make up well-being include ‘welfare’ values, including self-esteem, aspirations, and stigma and ‘deference’ values, including aspects of status and power. These views stem from apparently opposed positions: George is advocating an ‘absolute’ view of poverty, Baratz and Grigsby a ‘relative’ view. But these are interpretations of the social construction of need, not different definitions of poverty. Both agree that poverty is a lack of something, and they are largely agreed on what is lacking. The main disagreement is about the source and foundation of the needs.

  A PATTERN OF DEPRIVATION    Not every need can be said to be equivalent to poverty, and there are several interpretations of what makes up poverty. Some interpretations emphasize certain kinds of need, like hunger and homelessness, as particularly important. Some emphasize the seriousness of the deprivations that are experienced: food and shelter are often seen as more important than entertainments and transport (though there may still be grounds to consider people who are deprived of entertainments and transport as ‘poor’). The duration of circumstances is potentially important: a person can be homeless because of a natural disaster, but still be able to command sufficient resources to ensure that needs are met, and met rapidly. Poverty generally refers not just to deprivation, but to deprivation experienced over a period of time (Spicker 1993

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  Dollarisation of Poverty: Rethinking Poverty Beyond 2015

  Rethinking Poverty Beyond 2015

  • Palash Kamruzzaman(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Pivot

    (Publisher)

  1 but also a form of social and psychological deprivation occurring when people lack ownership, control or access to resources to maintain minimum levels of living (Like-Minded Group, 1990; McCarthy and Feldman, 1988). Poverty is neither a result of something for which the poor people are responsible, nor is it a natural fact; it is a social experience (Green and Hulme, 2005). Lewis (1962) observes that poverty has often seemed as a natural and integral part of a whole way of life, intimately related to poor technology and/or poor resources or both. Poverty may also involve class antagonism and a wide range of social problems but not necessarily define a class or any other ‘identity’ group based on shared territory or culture (Hickey and Bracking, 2005). It is also argued that poverty originates in social injustice rather than it being a mere consequence of scarcity of resources. When injustice is institutionalised in the social, political, legal and economic structures of a society and someone or a group of people become or stay poor, this refers to a structural social consequence (Ferge and Millar, 1987; Sobhan, 2002). Bearing these diverse backgrounds in mind, the following passages outline how poverty has been conceptualised by different scholars from assorted perspectives. For example, poverty can be perceived in monetary terms, comprising absolute and relative forms; through a capabilities approach; in terms of inequalities and social exclusion; chronic poverty can be distinguished from less severe poverty; there is a participatory approach; and then it can be described from a multidimensional perspective.

  2.2   Looking at poverty though multiple lenses

  Traditionally, the measurement, assessment and analysis of poverty are linked primarily with one’s income or consumption. This may be because such an approach enjoys the advantage of simplicity (Anand and Sen, 1997) based on the assumption that money is a universally convertible asset that can be translated into satisfying all other needs (Scott, 2002: 488; Ahuvia, 2008) – a view that is fundamentally different from the common saying of money cannot buy everything . However, it is observed that monetary approach to poverty is most widely used in development literature (Clarke, 2008). Other than its intuitive attractiveness, this is largely due to its long-term application, dating back to the earliest work on poverty in England during the 19th century. Monetary approach in understanding poverty can be applied both in absolute and in relative terms. An absolute measure of poverty is very popular. This refers to subsistence below a minimum, socially acceptable level, usually based on nutritional requirements and other essential goods. According to Roach and Roach (1972: 21–22), there will be little disagreement that persons who are so deprived that their physical survival is threatened are to be considered poor. Rowntree’s work has been described as the benchmark study of poverty in this regard (Laderchi et al., 2003; Alcock, 1993). Rowntree (1941) asserted poverty as not having enough to get by, and proposed a poverty line2

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  Exploring concepts of child well-being

  Implications for children's services

  • Axford, Nick(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Policy Press

    (Publisher)

  Poverty has the following characteristics. First, whereas need is about agency, and rights are about status and treatment, poverty is about resource-related ability to participate in customary living patterns in a given society. Second, poverty is an outcome/output hybrid in that it captures the standard of living that is potentially attainable given a certain level of income. It can be defined solely in terms of outputs, for instance receipt of basic social assistance or free school meals (in the UK), but usually it is defined in terms of resources – in particular money – and the goods, activities and services to which these afford access. It does not capture health or development directly, focusing on a lack of need-satisfiers rather than unmet need per se. Third, the concept of poverty is fairly limited in scope. It concerns material hardship owing to a lack of resources and is generally described in terms of income and living standards. The narrowness of this perspective becomes evident if it is linked to the four other main concepts considered in this book. It is an unmet need for economic security (Doyal and Gough, 1991) and hints at the infringement of the right to adequate living standards (Article 27 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; CRC). It represents a low score on the socioeconomic component of quality of life (QoL) (Smith, 1977; Commins, 1995) and might be taken to indicate exclusion from the economic sphere (Lister, 1997). Poverty 0 Exploring concepts of child well-being Fourth, poverty research usually concerns the wherewithal to live a minimally adequate life.To be poor is to lack sufficient resources to secure basic necessities.A subsistence approach suggests that people are only poor if they lack bare essentials like food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities and shelter (UN, 1995). Even higher poverty thresholds often allow only for a modest living standard – the absolute minimum level of participation in a given society.

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  Report on the World Social Situation 2010

  Rethinking Poverty

  • (Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • United Nations Publications

    (Publisher)

  Thus, the prime concern with the material dimensions of poverty alone has expanded to encompass a more holistic template of the components of well-being, includ- ing various non-material, psychosocial and environmental dimensions. Defi- cits within the other dimensions of well-being exist at levels of income well above the absolute—and even the relative—poverty lines. More recently, the perspective in developed countries has widened further through the application of the concept of social exclusion. A hallmark of this ap- proach is its emphasis on the relational dimension of deprivation. It is clear that these shifts of focus in discourse and practice—from absolute poverty to relative poverty, from income poverty to dimensional analysis, from poverty to well- being, and then to social exclusion—have profoundly altered the way depriva- tion is conceptualized, defined, measured, analysed, addressed and monitored. In contrast, in developing countries, the field is still dominated by a defini- tion of absolute poverty in terms of income. Little attention is paid to inequal- ity beyond that of some empirical work linking growth and poverty trends and suggesting that inequality first rises with growth before it falls. However, this tends to breed policy complacency by imparting a kind of naturalness to the persistence, even the widening, of inequality in the phase of early growth 46 Rethinking Poverty —the stage at which developing countries find themselves. There is no move to adopt relative poverty definitions as the new standard despite the widespread preference for it shown by developed economies. The absolute poverty lines have seldom been revised, even in countries where there has been significant economic growth; hence, there has been a steady fall in the share of average per capita income represented by the absolute poverty line, a trend evident in India and China, for instance.

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  The Development Dictionary

  A Guide to Knowledge as Power

  • Wolfgang Sachs(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Zed Books

    (Publisher)

  Different views of the poor have led to basically two types of reaction. The first represents a variety of forms of direct or indirect intervention, based on social, cultural or ethical reasons such as charity, assistance, education, confinement, repression, and so on. The second is grounded on philosophies of non-intervention, either justified by the belief that nothing should be done for the poor for they somehow deserve their condition, or on the assumption that nothing can be done, for all forms of intervention ultimately produce negative results, or no change at all, in their lives. 2 . Spimes (socio-cultural space-times) affecting various perceptions of poverty . While the above dimensions are mutually interactive in shaping the construct of /56 THE DEVELOPMENT DICTIONARY poverty, they are all, in turn, affected by the space-times to which they belong. This explains why, in different communities and at different times, the same materialities are perceived differently, both by those referred to as poor and by society at large. To take an example, Helena Norberg-Hodge mentions how the notion of poverty hardly existed in Ladakh when she visited that country for the first time in /753 . ‘Today’, she says, ‘it has become part of the language.’ When visiting an outlying village some eight years ago, Helena asked a young Ladakhi where were the poorest houses. ‘We have no poor houses in our village’, was the proud reply. Recently, Helena saw the same Ladakhi talking to an American tourist and overheard him say, ‘if only you could do something for us; we are so poor!’ 17 THE GLOBAL CONSTRUCT Global poverty is an entirely new and modern construct. The basic materials which have gone into the construct are essentially the economization of life and the forceful integration of vernacular societies into the world economy. In one of its first reports in /726 , the World Bank closely correlates the problem of global poverty with countries’ gross national products.

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  Poverty, Inequality and Migration in Latin Amerika (Volume 20.0)

  • (Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang International Academic Publishers

    (Publisher)

  The same type of data obtained by adding subject-specific modules to traditional statistical surveys has already provided information on the opinions of the poor, especially in terms of their needs, in a view to drawing up poverty reduction policies (Razafindrakoto and Roubaud, 2002 and 2005a). However, we should point out that surveys combining qualitative and quantitative variables, which offer many advantages for measuring poverty, are still seldom used in developing countries (Ravallion, 2002). Our study examines households' subjective assessment of their living conditions. Without entering into the vast debate about the concept of poverty, the latter is defined here as opposed to well-being, in the economic sense of the term. 2 It covers a wide set of themes, opened up in particular by Sen (1984) with the notion of lack of capabilities, and later explored and focused on in developing countries as part of the Voices of the Poor initiative (Narayan et al., 2000a and 200b; World Bank, 2001). Factors, such as vulnerability, social capital and autonomy, were added to lack of resources or difficulties in accessing basic social services (education, health) as means of understanding the phenomenon of poverty. These new additions to the concept of poverty, which are only just beginning to be taken into account by development economists in the poor countries, have been studied in depth for a long time in developed countries, by both economists and sociologists. The aim of this study is two-fold: first, to provide a better understanding of the phenomenon and to hone the criteria used to measure poverty; and second, to identify the domains that influence individuals' economic well-being and where action is required to improve their living standards. We also examine whether the results generally obtained in developed or transition countries are confirmed in the cases of the two developing countries studied here. To be more precise, the main focus is on four questions.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Sociology

  • Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek, Bryan S Turner, Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek, Bryan S Turner(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  There are major challenges to both these research traditions. Researchers who wish to conduct robust research and assessment of poverty over time or across place must come up with viable measurements that really get at what we mean by the term ‘poverty’ in diverse settings. Researchers who wish to investigate claims about the impact of household (or com-munity) poverty on the outcomes of children or adults must grapple with issues of selection bias if they are going to be taken seriously in the scientific and public debates around this important issue. Whether it be through natural experiments, instrumental variables, family and community fixed effects models, or some other innovative statistical approach, researchers who wish to make claims about the effects of poverty must go beyond traditional regression models to have their claims taken seriously in a social and political environ-ment where it is presumed that the poor – and not poverty – are responsible for their own reproduction. This chapter has not done justice to wide swathes of the sociological research tradition on poverty. I have also not reviewed the illus-trious tradition of community, ethnographic studies of the poor, extending all the way back to the Chicago School of the early twentieth century onward through global ethnographies of the twenty-first. This kind of qualitative research does much of the legwork in generat-ing the casual stories to undergird the statisti-cal associations that the quantitative poverty researchers document. These two intellectual traditions must be in constant dialogue – each moving toward the other – in order to solid-ify the foundation of our knowledge about economic inequality and deprivation in rich countries. NOTES 1 For the text of the speech see Harpers (August 1990), p. 22. 2 Such a conception fits very well with Karl Marx’s notion of the physical reproduction of labor.

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  Measuring Global Poverty

  Toward a Pro-Poor Approach

  • S. Wisor(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  ‘Poverty’ is defined as the lack of economic resources, and so defined, is an important cause of social exclusion in as much as the lack of those resources prevents participation. However, there are other important dimen- sions of social exclusion, which encompasses a broader (complex and multidimensional) set of concerns (2010a, p. 1). Though Atkinson and Marlier are right that in some cases social exclu- sion will include dimensions not traditionally associated with pov- erty, it may be mistaken to treat social exclusion as always broader than poverty, and merely a cause of, but never symptom of, poverty. Social Exclusion 115 Poverty causes social exclusion, and social exclusion causes poverty. Furthermore, poverty need not be understood solely in economic terms. The widespread acceptance of dimensions like health and education in measures and conceptions of poverty show that it is not to (and ought not to) be understood strictly in economic terms. The value added of a social exclusion approach What does social exclusion add to existing conceptions and measures of poverty, as relational features of deprivation are one of the factors influ- encing the conversion of resources into functionings on the capabilities approach? Very simply, it highlights these features, which were hitherto under-recognized by poverty analysis and insufficiently addressed by anti-poverty policy. Kabeer argues there are two distinct value added features of the social exclusion approach: First, it captures an important dimension of the experience of certain groups of being somehow ‘set apart’ or ‘locked out’ of participation in social life. Secondly, a focus on processes of exclusion is a useful way to think about social policy because it draws attention to the production of disadvantage through the active dynamics of social interaction, rather than through anonymous processes of impover- ishment and marginalisation (2000, p. 84).

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  Poverty, Ethics and Justice

  • Hennie Lötter(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of Wales Press

    (Publisher)

  For this reason attempts at a ‘bottom-up’ definition of poverty work, though perhaps not for the exact reasons underlying the aforementioned objection. In the process of constructing such definitions, researchers deliberately select people with special charac-teristics, that is, those who have experienced severe poverty. They some-times use social workers or aid workers thoroughly familiar with more serious cases of poverty as informants. 10 More importantly, the researchers interpret the experiences reported and construct a definition from them, transposing poor people’s self-descriptions into the typical theoretical constructs employed in the human sciences. Thus, in practice, this kind of definition rests on the idea that a defin-ition of poverty must be developed in dialogue between the discourses of the human sciences and the self-reported experiences of those who are poor, or who are in close contact with poor people. 11 If understood in this way, I agree with the point that underlies the aforementioned objection. Our academic understanding of concepts must be developed in dialogue with people affected by poverty and cohere with people’s every-day experiences of the phenomena they wish to portray. Furthermore, our theoretical definition of concepts needs to be tested for the illuminating value it has in clarifying the nature of poor people’s experiences. 12 I In recent United Nations Development Programme Reports (UNDP, 1997; UNDP, 2000), the authors use the term ‘human poverty’. Why add the adjective ‘human’ to the concept of poverty? Is it possible that 22 THE COMPLEXITY OF POVERTY AS A MORAL ISSUE other living beings like plants and animals can also suffer from, or live in, poverty? Can we speak of ‘animal poverty’ or ‘plants suffering poverty’? Let us test this proposal by means of an example. Imagine an elephant in a small zoo. The zoo has inadequate financial resources. The elephant is in a cramped cage with no trees, shrubs or grass.

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  Empowerment Series: An Introduction to the Profession of Social Work

  • Elizabeth Segal, Karen Gerdes, Sue Steiner, , Elizabeth Segal, Karen Gerdes, Sue Steiner(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  The Causes of Poverty LO 2 Addressing the problem of poverty would be easier if there were consensus about the causes of poverty. There appears to be no single cause, but rather, numerous perspectives. Some theories focus on the individual, and others look at structural reasons for poverty. Many of the theories are controversial and contradictory. EP 2 Table 3.3 Average Percentages of Persons in Poverty Decade Children All Persons 1960s 20.84% 17.47% 1970s 15.69% 11.81% 1980s 20.46% 13.84% 1990s 20.62% 13.75% 2000s 17.6% 12.5% 2010s 21.1% 14.7% Sources: Dalaker & Naifeh (1998); Proctor, Semega, & Kollar (2016). Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 76 CHAPTER 3 For example, one long-standing belief called the culture of poverty con-tends that people learn to be poor from growing up in impoverished areas. Although the environment is certainly powerful, this theory does not explain how some people who grow up poor become economically self-sufficient. An-other theory cites the functionality of poverty, indicating that poverty plays an important role in the economic structure and that there is little incentive to rid the nation of it. According to this theory, maintaining a pool of peo-ple who are poor means that workers are always available for less desirable and lower-paying but necessary jobs. This theory maintains that poverty keeps wages from increasing too much too fast. Most views are also laden with val-ues about worthiness and deservedness.

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