Ultra poverty and Hunger : Theory and Measurement

This first collection of chapters considers the measurement and understanding of poverty and hunger. Although there is broad agreement within the development community that, as Sen (1999) puts it, “Poverty must be seen as the deprivation of basic capabilities” (87),1 there is less agreement about how to identify the world’s poorest and determine where they live. As Deaton (2006) notes, it is often easy for an individual to say whether or not he or she is poor and whether individuals in his or her village are poor, but it is not so easy to determine how many people in a country are poor and almost impossible to determine who in the world is poor. The first set of chapters in Part 1, Chapters 2–4, focus on this measurement issue and describe trends in global poverty and hunger using the most common poverty and hunger measurements. The subsequent three chapters concentrate on the ultra poor, suggesting ways to identify them, distinguish their main characteristics, and track their progress. The final chapter looks more explicitly at the causes of ultra poverty and the mechanisms that perpetuate it.