User:Wanderingatlarge/key sources on poverty
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Stuff I'm working through with a view to adding to the entry:
Key Sources on ideas about Poverty
- Amartya Sen - the notion of capability - the ability of people to live the kinds of life they value (Sen 1985a) - thus the multidimensional nature of poverty, understood as “the failure of basic capabilities to reach certain minimally acceptable levels” (Sen 1992, p.109).- makes assessing poverty much more complicated - objective factors such as education level, AND subjective factors such as 'dignity' and 'security'- Participatory Poverty Assessment is used to capture these factors
Poverty has an "irreducible economic connotation" (Osmani, 2003: 5): the real concern underlying poverty is “capability failure because of inadequate economic means.” (Sen 1992, p.111).
Vulnerability: "Amartya Sen’s analysis of famines (Sen 1981). His work showed that, contrary to common perception, famines—even the most devastating ones—are seldom a generalized phenomenon afflicting all segments of the society equally." (cited by Osmani, 2003: 5).
Sen, A. 1981. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1985a. Commodities and Capabilities. Amsterdam: North-Holland. ———. 1985b. Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984. The Journal of Philosophy 82(4). ———. 1992. Inequality Reexamined. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1999. Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000. Social Exclusion: Concept, Application, and Scrutiny. Social Development Papers No. 1. Manila: Asian Development Bank.
cited in: Evolving Views on Poverty: Concept, Assessment, and Strategy by Siddiqur Rahman Osmani. July 2003, ADB Poverty and Social Development Papers, No. 7. http://www.adb.org/Documents/Papers/Evolving_views_poverty/default.asp
- Martha Nussbaum - attempts to identify the basic cababilities that are constitutive of poverty
- Ivan Illich - the idea that economic development causes poverty
Key sources for facts about current levels of poverty
Key sources for facts about trends in poverty levels over time
Povcalnet data shows that the percentage of the population living in households with consumption or income per person below the poverty line has decreased in each region of the world since 1999[1]:
| Region | 1999 | 2002 | 2004 |
|---|---|---|---|
| East Asia and Pacific | 15.40% | 12.33% | 9.07% |
| Europe and Central Asia | 3.60% | 1.28% | 0.95% |
| Latin America and the Caribbean | 9.62% | 9.08% | 8.64% |
| Middle East and North Africa | 2.08% | 1.69% | 1.47% |
| South Asia | 35.04% | 33.44% | 30.84% |
| Sub-Saharan Africa | 46.07% | 42.63% | 41.09% |
The data can be replicated using World Bank 2007 Human Development Indicator regional tables, and using the default poverty line of $32.74 per month at 1993 PPP.
