ST/ESA/STAT/POVERTY/WWW
1 January 2006

Handbook on Poverty Statistics:
Concepts, Methods and Policy Use

Chapter 3.

Poverty Measures

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.

Chapter 3