Indicators of Poverty

If the social problem of poverty is to be understood and solved, what it means to be poor must be defined and measured. In recent years especially, poverty researchers, policy makers, philosophers, and others have developed and proposed a wide variety of indicators of poverty. Such indicators range from comparatively simple measures of household income and consumption adequacy to much more complex efforts to assess personal empowerment and social exclusion across multiple domains. Different indicators, unsurprisingly, often produce different estimates of the incidence and distribution of poverty across demographic groups, and data limitations often pose challenges in using complex measures, especially in low-income countries. In addition, different poverty yardsticks can make it difficult or impossible to compare poverty conditions over time and space. Nevertheless, researchers ...