Measuring Poverty: Some Problems

Brian Easton

Estimates of the magnitude and situation of the poor need to be developed rigorously if they are not to be misleading, especially in ways that could be used against the interests of the poor. The basic paradigm of recent poverty research was established by the end of the 1970s, and with one or two exceptions little genuine progress in the use of the paradigm has been achieved since then. The one major significant innovation is that we are now able to trace the distribution of adjusted household income, and hence poverty lines, over a number of years.

This discussion uses a recent paper by Stephens, Waldegrave and Frater (SWF) to look at the standard of analytical rigour used in work on the poor. The SWF paper reports the use, in the New Zealand Poverty Measurement Project, of focus groups as a means of identifying a poverty line by asking for judgements of a minimum adequate household expenditure.

My analysis of the use of focus groups, household equivalence scales and other measurement issues confirms that we have learned little new about poverty despite a great deal of effort.