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Reducing
poverty has become an international concern, yet there is no international
consensus on guidelines for measuring poverty.
In
pure economic terms, 'income poverty' is when a family's
income fails to meet a federally established threshold that differs
across countries. Typically it is measured with respect to families
and not the individual, and is adjusted for the number of persons
in a family. Economists often seek to identify the families whose
economic position (defined as 'command over resources') falls below
some minimally acceptance level.(1) Similarly,
the international standard of 'extreme poverty' is set to the possession
of less than 1$ a day.
Frequently,
poverty is defined in either 'relative' or 'absolute' terms.
Absolute poverty measures poverty in relation to the amount of money
necessary to meet basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter.
The concept of absolute poverty is not concerned with broader "quality
of life" issues or with the overall level of inequality
in society. The concept therefore fails to recognise that individuals
have important social and cultural needs. This, and similar criticisms,
led to the development of the concept of relative poverty. Relative
poverty defines poverty in relation to the economic status of other
members of the society: people are poor if they fall below prevailing
standards of living in a given societal context. An important criticism
of both concepts is that they are largely concerned with income
and consumption.
The
concept of social
exclusion emerged largely in reaction to this type of
narrow definition of poverty. It has contributed significantly towards
including multi-faceted indicators of ill-being into the conceptual
understanding of poverty. To further develop the definition of the
concept of relative poverty or relative deprivation, three perspectives
are relevant; the income perspective indicates that a person is
poor only if his or her income is below the country's poverty line
(defined in terms of having income sufficient for a specified amount
of food); the basic needs perspective goes beyond the income perspective
to include the need for the provision by a community of the basic
social services necessary to prevent individuals from falling into
poverty; and finally, the capability (or empowerment) perspective
suggests that poverty signify a lack of some basic capability to
function.(2)
Social
scientists' understanding of poverty, on the other hand, is critical
of the economical idea of free choice models where individuals control
their own destiny and are thus the cause of their own poverty. Rather
than being interested in its measurement, sociologists generally
study the reasons for poverty, such as the roles of culture, power,
social structure and other factors largely out of the control of
the individual. Accordingly, the multidimensional nature of poverty,
in particular social aspects such as 'housing poor', 'health poor'
or 'time poor', needs to be understood in order to create more effective
programs for poverty alleviation. Hypotheses that typically play
a role in sociological theories of poverty are based on the idea
that individuals are influenced by the physical and cultural context
in which they live, and it gives importance to gender and household
structure.
Today
it is widely held that one cannot consider only the economic part
of poverty. Poverty is also social, political and cultural. Moreover,
it is considered to undermine human rights -economic (the right
to work and have an adequate income), social (access to health care
and education), political (freedom of thought, expression and association)
and cultural (the right to maintain one's cultural identity and
be involved in a community's cultural life).(3)
The Millennium Development Goals - global targets that the world's
leaders set at the UN
Millennium Summit in September 2000 - are an agenda for
reducing poverty, its causes and manifestations. As part of the
goal of eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP) seeks to halve,
between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is
less than one USD a day.
(1)
Smelser, N. J. and Baltes, P. B. (eds.) 2001. International Encyclopaedia
of the Social and Behavioural Sciences. Elsevier. Oxford Science
Ltd.
(2)
For more on this see 1997 UNDP Human Development Report.
(3)
Pierre Sané, in MOST-Newsletter, n° 10, 2001.
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