Concept Of Poverty

2.1.1 The Concepts of Poverty

It is important to adapt the concept of poverty on the appropriate context, as there is not a general concept that we can safely assume to hold for all countries at all times. Hence, poverty is a contested concept, the particular meaning of which depends on the ideological and political context within which it is used. Moreover, poverty takes its origin in social ethics, which can be seen as a central part of political philosophy, itself that domain of philosophical thinking looking for a theory of social arrangement (Dauphin, 2001). However, in the broadest sense it can be generally understood as the lack of, or inability to achieve, a socially acceptable standard of living, or the possession of insufficient

Absolute poverty refers to the inability to meet what thought to represent the absolute minimum requirements for human survival. According to FAO (2006), this concept of poverty refers to a standard of living defined in absolute terms. In this case, poverty is usually measured by the value in real terms of a given level of goods ensuring some form of minimum subsistence. For example, the value of basic food or the minimum income required to have decent lives. The absolute poverty is not only a biological problem but in essence a context-bound depending on the ability to fully participate in a society, several academics such as Amarty Sen (1981) have always been looking for an “irreducible core of absolute deprivation”, one unquestionably obvious when observing a human being suffering from hunger, or any “visible

It considered objectively when observable and measurable or typically, quantitative indicators are used to measure material or non-material dimensions. Thus, during recent years there have been several studies concerning the effects of using objective or indirect and subjective or direct ways of measuring poverty (Kangas and Ritakallio, 1997). By subjective measures, we mean indicators of the standard of living people actually enjoy, while the objective measures focus on people’s access to different kinds of resources. Subjective poverty is defined by examining which people should be considered poor. It proves that subjective poverty is a multidimensional concept. It also concludes that absolute and relative poverty thresholds coincide with the subjective one. It implies that increasing the absolute income level of individuals may not be enough to improve their subjective wellbeing, as they are also concerned with their relative income position (Siposné, 2010). Examples of subjective indicators are measures of the deficiencies in the consumption of necessities and of perceived over-indebtedness and scarcity. The main problem with the objective approach is to find a valid and reliable measure of the economic resources people are in control of and to define how and where to draw the poverty line. Moreover, subjective measures represent psychological elements and perceptions of poverty, where