Poverty Measurement Quotes

Car prices play a large role in calculating PPPs even while they play no role whatsoever in the consumption or consumption needs of the poor. And the prices of rice, bread and beans play a small role in calculating PPPs even though they play a huge role in meeting the consumption needs of the poor. So the World Bank's method of comparing and converting everything at general purchasing power parities into US dollars is highly distorting within an exercise whose purpose it is to determine whether households are or are not capable of meeting their basic consumption needs.

If the Planning Commission said those who live above Rs 5,000 a month are not at poverty line, obviously there is something wrong with the definition of poverty in this country. How can anybody live at Rs 5,000?

The poverty line in the U.S., for example, has nothing to do with the poverty line in India. It is a relative poverty line. It is reset from time to time but it is related to U.S. median income, so if I set that to be the absolute poverty line everyone in India would essentially be poor.

In comparative terms, there's no poverty in America by a long shot. Heritage Foundation political scientist Robert Rector has worked up figures showing that when the official U.S. measure of poverty was developed in 1963, a poor American family had an income twenty-nine times greater than the average per capita income in the rest of the world. An individual American could make more money than 93 percent of the other people on the planet and still be considered poor.

Good government is known from bad government by this infallible test: that under the former the labouring people are well fed and well clothed, and under the latter, they are badly fed and badly clothed.

By repealing the Child Poverty Act, which forced governments to take real action to tackle child poverty, this government brings a proud chapter of British history to an undignified end. In future the government will measure child poverty not by looking at whether they have any money, but by looking at their so-called 'life chances.'

Poverty assumes so many aspects here in India. There aren't only the poor that you see in the cities, there are the poor among the tribes, the poor who live in the forest, the poor who live on the mountains. Should we ignore them as long as the poor in the cities are better off? And better off with reference to what? To what people wanted ten years ago? Then it seemed like so much. Today it's no longer so much.

While easy to understand, the income-based poverty line has limitations. Specifically, the median monthly household income measures only income without considering assets.

We measure poverty by what I believe is a very, very crude concept. We actually measure poverty by trying to get some kind of an estimate of the minimum expenditures on food that are required to maintain health, multiplying that number by three, and saying that's the level of poverty. And it's a very crude, inaccurate arrangement.

There is no good way of measuring poverty.

The poverty line understates the true amount of poverty because it measures it as three times the breadbasket that a family needs, but it doesn't consider all the other things that are inflating far, far faster than food prices.

I believe Ofsted measures poverty. It measures deprivation. It doesn't measure excellence.

Relative poverty acknowledges that the definition of poverty should move with the times.

He (Lyndon B. Johnson) wanted to see poverty, so he came to see my team (1964 New York Mets).

I think in some ways it would make more sense to have as a poverty level a relative concept and say, the level of poverty is that level of income or that level of consumption below which 10 percent of the people now are.

We decided in the mid-1960s that all poor people are the same: they are all poor. We know they're poor because we have defined a poverty line, and they're all underneath it.

You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.

Like navigation markings in unknown waters, definitions of poverty need to be distinctive and unambiguous. A definition that is not precise is as bad as no definition at all.

If we cannot accurately measure poverty, we surely cannot accurately measure our efforts to tackle it.

The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.

Most elderly are retirees with relatively low incomes. But some may possess assets, and they will be classified as poor. As such, the elderly poverty rate could be overstated.

We need to make sure that access to a curative drug doesn't become a yardstick by which poverty is eventually measured. Doing so requires a shared commitment between innovators and the insurance plans that are harder pressed to offer these advances to the poor.