What Is Poverty?

The word poverty provokes strong emotions and many questions. However you define it, poverty is
complex; it does not mean the same thing for all people. For this author, we can identify six types of
poverty: situational, generational, absolute, relative, urban, and rural.

1. Situational poverty is generally caused by a sudden crisis or loss and is often temporary. Events
causing situational poverty include environmental disasters, divorce, or severe health problems.
2. Generational poverty occurs in families where at least two generations have been born into poverty.
Families living in this type of poverty are not equipped with the tools to move out of their situations.
3. Absolute poverty, involves a scarcity of such necessities as shelter, running water, and food. Families
who live in absolute poverty tend to focus on day-to-day survival.
4. Relative poverty refers to the economic status of a family whose income is insufficient to meet its
society's average standard of living.
5. Urban poverty occurs in metropolitan areas with populations of at least 50,000 people. The urban
poor deal with a complex aggregate of chronic and acute stressors (including crowding, violence, and
noise) and are dependent on often-inadequate large-city services.
6. Rural poverty occurs in nonmetropolitan areas with populations below 50,000. In rural areas, there
are more single-guardian households, and families often have less access to services, support for
disabilities, and quality education opportunities.

The Effects of Poverty

The aggregate of risk factors makes everyday living a struggle; they are multifaceted and interwoven,
building on and playing off one another with a devastatingly synergistic effect (Atzaba-Poria, Pike, &
Deater-Deckard, 2004). In other words, one problem created by poverty begets another, which in turn
contributes to another, leading to a seemingly endless cascade of deleterious consequences. A head
injury, for example, is a potentially dire event for a child living in poverty. With limited access to adequate
medical care, the child may experience cognitive or emotional damage, mental illness, or depression,
possibly attended with denial or shame that further prevents the child from getting necessary help;
impairments in vision or hearing that go untested, undiagnosed, and untreated; or undiagnosed behavior
disorders, such as AD/HD or oppositional personality disorder.
It's safe to say that poverty and its attendant risk factors are damaging to the physical, socioemotional,
and cognitive well-being of children and their families (Klebanov & Brooks-Gunn, 2006; Sapolsky, 2005).
Data from the Infant Health and Development Program show that 40 percent of children living in chronic
poverty had deficiencies in at least two areas of functioning (such as language and emotional
responsiveness) at age 3 (Bradley et al., 1994).

- Reading extract from: Jensen, Eric (2005).Teaching with poverty in mind : what being poor does to kids'
brains and what schools can do about it. ISBN:9781416608844, ASCD Publisher. U.S.A.

The Poverty of Poverty Measurement.

Measuring poverty accurately is important within the context of gauging the scale of the poverty
challenge, formulating policies and assessing their effectiveness. However, measurement is
never simply a counting and collating exercise and it is necessary, at the outset, to define what
is meant by the term “poverty”.
Extensive problems can arise at this very first step, and there are likely to be serious differences
in the perceptions and motivations of those who define and measure poverty. Even if there is
some consensus, there may not be agreement on what policies are appropriate for eliminating
poverty.

In most developed countries, there has emerged a shift in focus from absolute to relative
poverty, stemming from the realization that the perception and experience of poverty have a
social dimension. Although absolute poverty may all but disappear as countries become richer,
the subjective perception of poverty and relative deprivation will not. As a result, led by the
European Union (EU), most rich countries (with the notable exception of the United States of
America), have shifted to an approach entailing relative rather than absolute poverty lines.
Those countries treat poverty as a proportion, say, 50 or 60 per cent, of the median per capita
income for any year. This relative measure brings the important dimension of inequality into the
definition. Alongside this shift in definition, there has been increasing emphasis on monitoring
and addressing deficits in several dimensions beyond income, for example, housing, education,
health, environment and communication.
Thus, the prime concern with the material dimensions of poverty alone has expanded to
encompass a more holistic template of the components of well-being, including various non-
material, psychosocial and environmental dimensions.

Deficits within the other dimensions of well-being exist at levels of income well above the
absolute—and even the relative—poverty lines. More recently, the perspective in developed
countries has widened further through the application of the concept of social exclusion. A
hallmark of this approach is its emphasis on the relational dimension of deprivation. It is clear
that these shifts of focus in discourse and practice—from absolute poverty to relative poverty,
from income poverty to dimensional analysis, from poverty to wellbeing, and then to social
exclusion—have profoundly altered the way deprivation is conceptualized, defined, measured,
analyzed, addressed and monitored. In contrast, in developing countries, the field is still
dominated by a definition of absolute poverty in terms of income. Little attention is paid to
inequality beyond that of some empirical work linking growth and poverty trends and suggesting
that inequality first rises with growth before it falls.

The World Bank $1-per-day line.

The dollar-a-day poverty line has its roots in the purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates
generated by the International Comparison Program project, undertaken jointly by the United
Nations Statistics Division, the World Bank and the University of Pennsylvania. The PPPs were
used first to construct an “average” poverty line for a group of countries for which the
International Comparison Program provided information and then to convert this common line
into national currencies in order to estimate the incidence of poverty using national
distributional data.
The Program has produced three rounds of estimates: in 1985, when the Program covered 22
countries, with a poverty line of $1 per person per day; in 2000-2001, when the estimates were
revised using the PPP exchange rates of the Program’s 1993 round with a poverty line of $1.08
per person per day; and in 2005, when the Program produced new estimates using its 2005 PPPs,
with the poverty line raised to $1.25 per person per day. Each subsequent round leads to a re-
estimation of the incidence of poverty. According to the last round, the number of people living
below the international poverty line in 2005 was 1.4 billion, or close to 500 million (or more than
50 per cent) more than previously estimated.

- Reading extract from: DESA (2010). The Poverty of Poverty Measure Chapter III. Department of
Economic ad Social Affairs, UN. Available at:
https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/chapter3.pdf