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
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