Poverty can be defined as the lack of basic human needs like food, shelter, and clothing. It can be understood as either an absolute lack of resources or as relative deprivation compared to others in one's community. There are various ways to measure poverty, including the headcount ratio, poverty gap index, and squared poverty gap index. The headcount looks just at those below the poverty line, while the other indices consider how far below the line people fall. Reducing poverty requires increasing access to necessities like food, healthcare, education, as well as growing personal incomes and controlling overpopulation.

1. Poverty
Presented By :
Hlabane Sherol

2. Poverty is the deprivation of food, shelter, money
and clothing when people can’t satisfy their basic
needs. Poverty can be understood simply as a
lack of money or more broadly in terms of
barriers to everyday human life.

3.  According to Mobile Orshansky who developed
the poverty measurements used by the U.S.
government, “ Poor is to be deprived of those
goods, services and pleasures which others around
us take for granted.”
 According to David Kurten , Poverty also involve
social disintegration and environmental
degradation which he describe as forming the
threefold human crisis in the world today.

4.  Poverty is the other economic problem facing
most of the nations in the world. There is no
unique definition of poverty.

5. Types Of Poverty
(1) Absolute Poverty : (Destitution) It refers to the
state of severe deprivation of basic human
needs.
(2) Relative Poverty : It is defined contextually as
Economic inequality in location or society in
which people live.

6. Lorenz curve
 In economics ,the Lorenz
curve is a graphical
representation of the
cumulative distribution
function of the empirical
probability distribution of
wealth; it is a graph
showing the proportion of
the distribution assumed
by the bottom y% of the
values.

7.  It is often used to represent income distribution,
where it shows for the bottom x% of households,
what percentage y% of the total income they have.
The percentage of households is plotted on the x-
axis, the percentage of income on the y-axis.
 It can also be used to show distribution of assets.
In such use, many economists consider it to be a
measure of social inequality. It was developed by
Max O. Lorenz in 1905 for representing inequality
of the wealth distribution.

8. Greater the curvature of Lorenz line, greater will be
the relative degree of inequality.

9. Four Possible Lorenz curves

10.  The concept is useful in describing inequality
among the size of individuals in ecology, and in
studies of biodiversity, where cumulative
proportion of species is plotted against cumulative
proportion of individuals. It is also useful in
business modeling.
 E.g. In consumer finance, to measure the actual
delinquency Y% of the X% of people with worst
predicted risk scores.

11. Facts And Figures
 The world bank estimated that ,
1) Around 1.29 billion people were in absolute
poverty in 2008.
2) About 400 million people in absolute poverty in
India and 173 million people in china.
3) Sub-saharan Africa at 47% had the highest
incidence rate of absolute poverty in 2008.
4) Between 1990 and 2010, about 663 million
people moved above the absolute poverty level.

12. 5) Every year 11 million children living in poverty
die before their 5th birthday.
6) 1.02 billion people go to bed hungry every night.

13. The World bank’s “Voice of the poor” , based
on research with over 20,000 poor people in
23 countries, identifies a range of factors
which poor people identify as part of poverty
are :
(1) Precious livelihoods
(2) Excluded location
(3) Physical limitation

14. (4) Gender relationship
(5) Lack of security
(6) Problems in social relationship
(7) Weak community organization
(8) Limited capabilities

15. Poverty line
 The poverty threshold or poverty line is the minimum
level of income deemed adequate in a given country.
 In practice, like the definition of poverty, the official or
common understanding of the poverty line is significantly
higher in developed countries than in developing
countries.
 The common international poverty line has in the past
been roughly $1 a day. In 2008, the World Bank came out
with a revised figure of $1.25 at 2005 purchasing-power
parity (PPP).

16.  Determining the poverty line is usually done by
finding the total cost of all the essential resources that
an average human adult consumes in one year.
 The largest of these expenses is typically the rent
required to live in an apartment, so historically,
economists have paid particular attention to the real
estate market and housing prices as a strong poverty
line affector.

17. Gini coefficient
 The Gini coefficient is usually defined
mathematically based on the Lorenz curve , which
plots the proportion of the total income of the
population (y axis) that is cumulatively earned by
the bottom x% of the population. The line at 45
degrees thus represents perfect equality of
incomes.

18. Gini Coefficient & Aggregate
measures of inequality

19. The Gini coefficient can then be thought
of as the ratio of the area that lies between
the line of equality and the Lorenz curve
over the total area under the line of
equality .

20.  The Gini coefficient can theoretically range from
0 to 1; it is sometimes expressed as a percentage
ranging between 0 and 100. In practice, both
extreme values are not quite reached.
 A low Gini coefficient indicates a more equal
distribution, with 0 corresponding to complete
equality, while higher Gini coefficients indicate
more unequal distribution, with 1 corresponding to
complete inequality.

21. Characteristics of Poverty
 Effects of poverty also be causes and creating a “Poverty
cycle” operating across multiple levels, individual,
national, global.
(1) Health : one third of deaths are due to poverty
related causes. . Those living in poverty suffer
from life expectancy.
 According to the World Health Organization, hunger and
malnutrition are the single gravest threats to the world's
public health and malnutrition is by far the biggest
contributor to child mortality , present in half of all cases.

22.  Almost 90% of maternal deaths during childbirth
occur in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, compared to
less than 1% in the developed world.

23. (2) Hunger : Rises in the living cost making poor
people less able to afford items. Poor people spend
most of the portion of their budget on to food than
richer person.

24. (3) Education : Poor children are suffering from hunger,
irritability,headache,viral infection, colds. It is safe to
state that children who live at or below the poverty level
will have far less success educationally than children who
live above the poverty line.
• Poor children have a great deal less healthcare and this
ultimately results in many absences from the academic
year.
• Additionally, poor children are much more likely to
suffer from hunger, fatigue, irritability, headaches, ear
infections, flu, and colds. These illnesses could
potentially restrict a child or student's focus and
concentration.

25. (4) Housing : Poverty increases the risk of
homelessness. Slum-dwellers, who make up a
third of the world's urban population, live in a
poverty no better, if not worse, than rural
people, who are the traditional focus of the
poverty in the developing world , according to a
report by the United Nations. There are over
100 million street children worldwide.

26. (5) Violence : According to the reports, many
women become victims of trafficking. The most
common form of which is Prostitution as a mean
of survival and economic desperation.
• Deterioration of living conditions can often
compel children to abandon school in order to
contribute family income.
E.g. Slavery and Human trafficking.

28. • E.g. In Zimbabwe, no. of girls are turning to
prostitution for food to survive because of
increasing poverty.

29. Measures of poverty
There are Various measures of the extent of poverty .
 The head count index.
 The poverty gap index.
 The squared poverty gap (poverty severity) index.

30. Head count index
• The most widely used measure is the headcount
index.
• It simply measures the proportion of the
population that is counted as poor.
Head count index = No. of poor /Total no. of
population

31. Weaknesses
• It does not take the intensity of poverty into
account.
• Survey does not indicate how poor the poor
are, and hence does not change if people below
the poverty line become poorer.
• The poverty estimates should be calculated for
individuals and not the households.

32. Significance
 The most common method of measuring and
reporting poverty is the headcount ratio, given as the
percentage of population that is below the poverty
line.
 One of the undesirable features of the headcount
ratio is that it ignores the depth of poverty; if the
poor becomes poorer, the headcount index does not
change.
 Poverty gap index provides a clearer perspective on
the depth of poverty.

33. Poverty gap index
 Poverty gap index is a measure of the intensity of
poverty. It is defined as the average poverty gap in
the population as a proportion of the poverty line.
 The poverty gap index is an improvement over the
poverty measure headcount ratio which simply
counts all the people below a poverty line, in a given
population, and considers them equally poor.
 Poverty gap index estimates the depth of poverty by
considering how far, on the average, the poor are
from that poverty line.

34. Calculation
 Poverty gap index (PGI) is calculated as,
where is the total population of poor who are living
at or below the poverty line and is the income of the
poor household .
• In this calculation, all households whose income is
above the poverty line are not considered, because
PGI is a measure of depth of poverty below the
poverty line .

35.  By definition, poverty gap index is a percentage
between 0 and 100%.
 Sometimes it is reported as a fraction, between 0
and 1. A theoretical value of zero implies that all
the extremely poor people are exactly at the
poverty line.
 A theoretical value of 100% implies all the
extremely poor people have zero income. In some
literature, poverty gap index is reported as while
headcount ratio is reported as .

36. Squared poverty gap index
 Squared poverty gap index, also known poverty
severity index or , is related to poverty gap index.
 It is calculated by averaging the square the poverty
gap ratio. By squaring each poverty gap data, the
measure puts more weight the further a poor person's
observed income falls below the poverty line.
 The squared poverty gap index is one form of a
weighted sum of poverty gaps, with the weight
proportionate to the poverty gap.

37.  Sen index, sometimes referred to , is related to
poverty gap index (PGI).It is calculated as follows:
 Where H is the headcount ratio and Gz is the income
Gini coefficient of only the people below the poverty
line.

38. Poverty Reduction
 Increasing supply of basic needs.
 Increasing supply of food and other goods.
 Increasing supply of healthcare and education,
water and energy utilities.
 Removing constraints on govt. services
 Reversing brain drains.
 Controlling overpopulation.
 Increasing personal income.