Project Overview
UN Steering Committee on Poverty Statistics
  Activities and Meetings
  Outline of the Handbook as of October 2003
  Outline of the Handbook as of July 2004
Instructions on the Format of Manuscripts
   
  Chapter 1. Preface and introduction
Chapter 2. Overview of concepts and fundamentals of poverty measurements
  Chapter 3. Practices of poverty measurements
  Chapter 4. Statistical tools and estimation methods for poverty measures based on household surveys
  Chapter 5. Statistical issues in measuring poverty from non-survey sources
  Chapter 6. Poverty analysis for national policy use: poverty profiles, mapping and dynamics
  Chapter 7. Conclusions and recommendations
  Addendum
 
 
 

ST/ESA/STAT/POVERTY/WWW
21 July 2004

Handbook on Poverty Statistics:
Concepts, Methods and Policy Use

Chapter 2. Overview of concepts and fundamentals
of poverty measurement

To highlight the conceptual debates surrounding: concepts of poverty - dimensions of well being - absolute vs. relative poverty; approaches to measurement - based on monetary indicators vs. social and other non-monetary indicators (also referred as: access to basic needs, services and basic capital formation); objective and subjective experience of poverty - methods for integrating and reconciling subjective and objective indicators; poverty lines such as food poverty lines, national, regional, international poverty lines; poverty indices and units - head counts, poverty gap; poverty comparisons - based on stochastic dominance; the case for a "system" of poverty monitoring comprising point estimates and measures of distribution, snapshots and time series estimates, within and across country comparisons; To provide references for an in-depth study of these topics