A wealth of data, July 29, 2010, The Economist: “What is poverty and when is a person poor? Most would agree that poverty involves not having enough of certain things, or doing without others that richer people take for granted. But what is ‘enough’, which goods and services really matter, and who should decide these questions-researchers, governments or international agencies-are less tractable issues. Perhaps the poor themselves should have the final word. But this presents its own problems. Tabitha, a 44-year-old woman from a slum outside Nairobi, told researchers from Oxford University that going without meals was ‘normal for us’. Diminished expectations are only one of the effects of dire poverty. In the world of international development, most have rallied around the ‘dollar-a-day’ poverty line (or more precisely, the $1.25-a-day measure) and its less acute cousin, $2-a-day poverty. These World Bank measures judge a person to be poor if his income falls short of a given level, adjusted for differences in purchasing power. In principle poverty rates based on these measures count the fraction of people in a country who lack the resources to buy a notional, basic basket of goods…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty