Defining Poverty

So how does one define poverty? Is poverty absolute or relative? Is someone who does not have access to basic health care and education poor? Or is someone who is financially well off but is not allowed to become a part of society poor? What about someone living below the breadline? Or someone who does not have access to basic shelter and clothing?

I guess this is a debate that can go on for a long, long time. However one thing is clear, though I'm no expert, that the definition of poverty is a matter of perspective. In the developing world, where billions of people struggle to make ends meet, where the next meal is in question, where disease and malnutrition are the scourge of society, poverty is defined as not having access to the very basic of human needs - food, clothing, and shelter. The developed world, on the other hand, largely believes in relative poverty. So anyone in the US who cannot afford a car is considered poor. One in five children in the UK think not owning a mobile phone is a sign of poverty.

The Oxford dictionary rather unhelpfully defines poverty as "the state of being poor", though it defines the word poor as "having very little money; not having enough money for basic needs". Merriam Webster defines it as "a: the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions b: renunciation as a member of a religious order of the right as an individual to own property". The World Bank currently uses a figure of $US 1 per day (in 1985 purchasing power dollars) for absolute poverty. Under this measure, roughly half the world's population lives in abject poverty.

The alternative has been to define poverty as relative deprivation, for example as half mean income (or as 60% of the median income, as in the UK), or as exclusion from participation in society. Thus the European Union has decided that ‘the poor shall be taken to mean persons, families and groups of persons whose resources (material, cultural, social) are so limited as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life in the member state in which they live’.

Growing up in India I have always seen people struggling to scratch together the next meal. In such circumstances, someone living in their own house - however decrepit it may be, someone with assured basic resources, someone not literally starving, is not considered to be living in abject poverty. In some senses this is unfortunate, for just being surrounded by people who are simply struggling to survive denies these 'also poor' the attention they need.

So, is there a right definition of poverty? The answer, almost certainly, is 'no'. Poverty means different things to different people, and to different societies and nations. The true definition of poverty for any individual, however, and the only definition relevant to him or her, is how it is defined in the society he or she lives in. Any other definition is academic, and any other understanding is meaningless.



Top