Poverty and Mothering

For the most part, individuals and families are considered to be poor if and when their income and resources are deemed insufficient for them to “normally” participate in society. Miles Corak writes that identifying and measuring poverty in industrialized countries involves at least three things: identifying and measuring resources necessary for survival; establishing thresholds that distinguish poor from nonpoor; and counting individual adults and children that find themselves below the thresholds.

The low-income cutoff (LICO) and the low-income measure (LIM) are commonly used to do this, and involve the calculation of proportion of income levels deemed appropriate or typical for survival—both measures of low income (or poverty) calculated in relation to other national incomes. A third, market basket measures (MBM), is a budget study of consumption ...