Capability Measure of Poverty

THE CAPABILITY MEASURE of poverty (CMP) is a response to the growing recognition that income poverty is only a part of what constitutes conditions of poverty. The impetus for developing capability measures of poverty comes from the 1996 Human Development Report (HDR), produced by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

In that report, human development is defined in relation to the expansion of capabilities while deprivation is defined as the lack of basic or necessary capabilities. The 1996 HDR attempted to better understand both the extent of poverty and experiences of poverty by considering factors beyond income. Addressing links between poverty and human development and attempting to assess the multiple needs of poor people, the report introduced the CMP criteria to provide a multidimensional measure of deprivation. The capability measure of poverty shifts focus from means or input, such as income, toward ends by focusing on outcomes that reflect people's quality of life. Emphasis is placed on understanding how, and under what circumstances, people are able to act toward meeting their needs.

The CMP focuses on the percentage of people who lack basic or essential capabilities that are necessary to allow people to escape income poverty in a manner that can be sustained. Of particular concern is the lack of three basic capabilities for which the CMP provides a composite index. The first is the lack of nourishment and health as reflected in the proportion of children under 5 years old who are underweight. The second concerns the capability for healthy reproduction, as represented by the proportion of births unattended by people with proper training. The third factor is the extent of female illiteracy, which expresses a lack of capability to access education.

These factors are taken to speak to broader issues, such as overall health and nutrition and access to health services as a whole and to education. Significantly the measures emphasize women's deprivation because this has such a crucial impact on the development of families and social relations.

Applying the capability measure of poverty suggests that almost twice as many people in developing countries are poor than would be identified as such if one focused only on those below the income poverty line. Looking at poverty beyond the lack of income and addressing capability poverty reveal that the number of poor people in developing countries may be underestimated [Page 117]by almost 700 million people where only income poverty is accounted for. In addition to the problem of underestimating the extent of actual poverty, failure to improve people's capabilities will contribute to the further growth of income poverty.

The Human Development Report of 1996 concluded that poverty cannot be eradicated simply by increasing income. Properly addressing poverty also requires a broadening of human capabilities as well as the productive deployment of those capabilities.

More recently there have been efforts to develop more comprehensive or refined measures of people's capabilities. Among the difficulties facing more comprehensive approaches remains the lack of available data across contexts.

Perhaps the most influential contribution to a capability measure of poverty is offered in the work of the economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. Sen notes that the relationship between income and capabilities can vary greatly between communities and between individuals in the same community. Thus a numerical poverty line based on means such as income does not address variations in personal or social characteristics. Sen's work benefits from comparative analysis, which shows, as in comparisons between the United States and Europe or China and India, that countries with a similar Gross Domestic Product (GDP) can show widely differing capabilities for survival and education.

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