Poverty, Deprivation and Consistent Poverty*

Abstract

Controversy over the setting of poverty lines and its narrow focus on income has undermined the influence of poverty research on policy. The deprivation approach overcomes these limitations by identifying deprivation as an inability to afford items that receive majority support for being essential. This paper estimates the incidence of deprivation and compares the results with those produced using a conventional poverty framework. The results confirm overseas findings by showing that the groups most deprived differ from those with the highest poverty rates and that there is a low degree of overlap between income poverty and deprivation. Older people show up as faring better under the deprivation approach, while working‐age individuals and families fare worse and the relative position of the most highly disadvantaged groups are worse in terms of deprivation than in terms of poverty. Deprivation also provides a clearer differentiation between those who can and cannot afford specific necessities than a classification based on low income, and is also shown to vary systematically with several indicators of subjective well‐being. Estimates of consistent poverty that combine low income with deprivation are shown to differ from conventional (income‐based) poverty rates, and provide the basis for future poverty measures.

Community concepts of poverty: an application to premium exemptions in Ghana’s National Health Insurance Scheme

“…First it highlights the fact that given the social and contextual nature of poverty rigid application of over simplified and standardized lists of identification criteria are not the way to go. Poverty is best identified by a composite of variables rather than one or a few simple (monetary) variables [8,30,31]. Our study revealed that with regard to material indicators of poverty, the range of indicators covered the themes of employment, ability to put and keep children in school, food availability and consumption, physical appearance, housing conditions, asset ownership, and health seeking behavior.…”

Capacity for Freedom—A New Way of Measuring Poverty Amongst Australian Children

“…Harding et al 2001a). Other authors have also undertaken studies to expand the use of income alone as a measure of poverty (see for example, Saunders and Naidoo 2009;Saunders et al 2007b;Saunders 1998b;Social Inclusion Unit 2009b); however none have adopted a multidimensional poverty approach. Due to the perception of the need for a new multidimensional measure of poverty to be developed specifically for Australia, the Freedom Poverty Measure was constructed.…”

An alternative measure of social wellbeing: analysing the key conceptual and statistical components of quality of life

“…That is, they have endeavoured to measure and incorporate the individual's utility function through an assessment of whether purchase of the item was based on its affordability or its desirability to the particular respondent (Saunders 2004). Those who did not possess and could not afford items that are viewed as essential by the majority of respondents are then identified as economically deprived (Nolan & Whelan 1996;Saunders & Naidoo 2009). Research by Saunders has shown that living conditions captured by these measures are negatively and significantly associated with social wellbeing (Saunders & Zhu 2009).…”

“…We determined that a 25 per cent cut-off would be applied and those items where 75 per cent or more of respondents indicated the items were important were retained. Since the selection of such a cut-off point is inevitably somewhat arbitrary and different criteria can lead to different results (for example, Saunders & Naidoo, 2009), the list of selected items was thoroughly screened for conceptual consistency and generalisability to the entire population. Literature findings and conceptual arguments were used to further refine the set of items included in the index.…”

“…Extensive research has been conducted reviewing these items and whether respondents considered them essential (Saunders 2008;Saunders & Naidoo 2009). In our study, respondents were asked if there had been times in the last 12 months when they or a family member were forced to go without the listed material resources because they could not afford them.…”