Counting the Poor

Historically, especially in Latin America, more effort has gone into assessing the extent of “income poverty”— whether individuals possess sufficient income to live a minimally adequate life—than into determining the extent of non-income deprivations such as access to water and sanitation, adequate educational opportunities and basic health care. Thanks to the rising influence of the “human development” perspective that emphasizes non-income achievements, greater attention has been given in recent years to such factors as health status, education, quality of shelter, and access to clean water. However, whether or not people have adequate resources to achieve basic requirements continues to be a crucial factor in determining whether a person is poor. It is hard to imagine a practical approach to poverty assessment that could do without it altogether.

The most influential approach to income poverty assessment in the regional and global context is the “money metric” approach used by the World Bank. This approach, which employs the “one dollar per day” and the “two dollars per day” international poverty lines, converts these poverty lines into local currencies using “purchasing power parity” conversion factors. It then uses national household surveys to identify in each country the number of persons whose local income is lower than the national poverty lines that have been deemed equivalent to the international poverty lines.

The World Bank’s estimates suggest there have...

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