POVERTY - Difference between relative and absolute poverty

1. Relative poverty

1.1. Percentage of median income.

1.2. The relative threshold fix a limit calculated according to global distribution of income or consumption in the country.

1.3. Particularly in Europe because of the intermediary income of its population and the difficulty to establish common good and services.

1.4. Difficulties to identify behavior of people with this evaluation.

2. Absolute poverty

2.1. Most of the countries in the world use the absolute poverty to determine poverty. It is a value fixed determining things on what household can count to satisfy their elementary needs.

2.2. Basket of goods and services considered like indispensable.

2.3. Access to some good, independently of the wealth of the other.

2.4. Use in developing countries.

3. Others

3.1. Comparison evaluated with the dollar. However all the world isn’t entre in a market society.

3.2. All richness are not traduce in money in all countries.

3.3. F. BOURGIGNON : problem of repartition in the household, especially due to gender gap.

3.4. Intense poverty or multidimensional poverty: health, education and stand of living. Between 1990 and 2005, 270 millions of people died caused by poverty (more than all wars in the XXth century).

3.5. Many limits to threshold of poverty and poverty rate.

4. Approaches

4.1. Approach of capability - Armartya Sen

4.2. Notion of primaries goods - John Rawls in “Theory of justice”

4.3. The monetary poverty according to Ravallion

4.4. Cause of poverty --> book Why are you poor? of William T.Wolmann. Poverty caused by wealth people, by destiny or by our fault?

5. Report

5.1. Inequalities increased in this last two centuries and more in these two last decades.

5.2. Allocation to Natural resources: 20% of the global population consumes 60% of natural resources.

5.3. 50% of the population share 1% of global wealth.

5.4. Extreme poverty: less than 1 dollars by day and by person, that is to say 1,3 milliards of people.