New poverty formula proves test for India, By Raymond Zhong, July 27, 2014, Wall Street Journal: “India is wrestling with an important question: How do you count the poor if you can’t agree on the definition of poverty? Debate over redrawing the poverty line—the product of reams of academic research, field surveys and mathematical modeling—might seem arcane but carries great consequence. Under a new formula proposed last month by a government-appointed committee, nearly 30% of India’s 1.2 billion people would be classified as poor, up from 22% now, an increase of 94 million people. Decades of disagreement over how to measure the poor in countries around the world suggest there is something unquantifiable about poverty—that, like goodness and obscenity, it may be easier to recognize than to define…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty