Poverty assessment

'''Poverty assessment '''

discussion        “The World Bank’s (World Bank 2000) self-declared approach to poverty assessment … uses income and expenditure data (obtained primarily from sample survey and price data provided by national governments) to calculate aggregate levels of consumption. To measure and compare poverty, the Bank uses national and purchasing power parity estimates, respectively, to calculate country-specific and global poverty lines, below which consumption is associated with poverty.

                             The value of measuring poverty in this way is that it provides and objective numerical standard upon which the performance on an economy may be assessed and compared. However, as Sen (1981: Chapter 2) has argued, biological approaches suffer from a number of problems, not least the difficulty of establishing (across cultures, lifestyles, metabolism and so on) what constitutes a ‘minimum necessity,’ associating nutritional needs and intake with what one actually consumes and finally, the difficulty of measuring non-food items, such as shelter, access to education, freedom etc. […] [Sen] draws our attention to the notion that capabilities, entitlement and poverty are necessarily rooted in the material and symbolic power of human relationships” (Johnson 2009:112-113, emphasis added).