Raising the Standard: The War on Global Poverty
There are two standard approaches to the measurement of poverty: an exclusive survey-based method, and the alternative method of using distribution from the surveys and means from the national accounts data. Over the last two decades, household surveys have shown a disturbing trend in terms of the decreasing amount of survey ‘capture’ of national accounts data. This chapter suggests a third method for measuring poverty; this method imputes the growth rate in national accounts consumption to the mean in the benchmark year 1987. The results using this method show world poverty decline to be considerably larger than that revealed by the ‘official’ World Bank exclusive survey method. This finding forms the basis of the suggestion that the world poverty line needs to be raised in order to reflect the drift from absolute to relative poverty in the developing world. The chapter also emphasizes the lack of any relationship, theoretical or empirical, between initial inequality and future trends in poverty. What matters is the inequality around the poverty line, not overall inequality.
Keywords: world poverty, inequality, exclusive survey method, relative poverty, poverty line, economic growth, absolute poverty
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .