poverty landfill.jpgChapter Three - What is Poverty? How many people are poor?

 

We could construct an entire academic career and secure millions of pounds’ worth of grants if we chose to go into the technicalities of measuring global poverty. But we’re not going to do that. Instead we’re going to give a quick outline of the economists’ ‘best guess’ at how many people have an extremely low income and then we’ll discuss wider definitions of poverty that do not look at income alone. Our purpose is to outline what problem you are trying to solve when you try to reduce poverty and to emphasise that reducing poverty is not simply a question of giving people more money. If your company chooses to emphasise its contribution to poverty reduction, this chapter will also discuss how to present your activities in a way that is most relevant to governments, opinion-formers and development agencies.

Thank you for reading the first few paragraphs of this chapter.  For more, you can click here to order "Make Poverty Business" from Amazon.

Chapter 3 - Links and resources

Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen, published by Oxford University Press in 1999, is the fundamental text we draw on in this chapter. It’s packed full of material, not all of which will be relevant to business readers, but it’s the essential text if you’re really interested in this aspect of poverty.

Dissent on Development by Peter Bauer was published in the 1970s (initially by Weidenfield and Nicolson in 1971, followed by a revised edition in 1972 by Harvard University Press), but remains a fundamental text if you treasure personal initiative and the private sector, and are suspicious of government intervention and large aid programmes. It’s not an easy read, but is useful ammunition if your development friends try to assume the moral high ground.

Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers are available from the World Bank and imf. They are available for free download from the IMF website (www.imf.org/external/np/prsp/prsp.asp). They are a valuable source of economic data and are key for anyone attempting to make themselves relevant to a country’s development plans.

The Penn World Table gives a host of economic data, including Purchasing Power Parity figures, for every country. It is available at no cost and with an easy-to-use interface at http://pwt.econ.upenn.edu