ABSTRACT

Poverty is an issue that has attracted the attention of leading academic scholars and has inspired some of the greatest works of fiction. Whether it be Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables in nineteenthcentury France, Dickens’s characters living in the squalid slums of Victorian London, or those excluded from today’s advanced democratic societies or struggling to survive famine in sub-Saharan Africa, throughout history poverty has motivated the search for understanding and been a rallying call for action. It has attracted the attention of the world’s leading social scientists, inspiring the conflicting theories of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, the policies developed by welfare state pioneers Bismarck and Beveridge, and the conceptual and measurement skills of generations of researchers, from Booth and Rowntree to Townsend and Sen. Poverty has featured prominently on the post-war policy agenda, whether it be the 1960s US ‘war on poverty’, the British government’s attack on child poverty in the 1990s, or the United Nations (UN)’s Millennium Development Goals, which include halving extreme poverty by 2015. A central idea that links these diverse developments is the notion that poverty is bad – bad in terms of its immediate effects on those who experience it, bad also because of its longer-term consequences, particularly for children, and bad for those societies whose inaction implicitly condones it. Yet there is a lack of clarity about what poverty is, how it can be identified, and what needs to be

done to address it – both in developing countries who lack the resources for an all-out attack, and in affluent countries where average living standards are higher, but where unmet need still exists, at least in a relative sense. The eradication or alleviation of poverty has been at the forefront of the social policy agenda since the medieval poor laws were first enacted in fourteenth-century England. These laws, expanded under legislation enacted in the 1530s, were generally piecemeal, operating at the local parish level and distinguished between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor – the latter being denied support because their plight was seen as the result of their own idleness or immoral behaviour. It was not until the development of the welfare state that a coherent policy framework for tackling poverty at the national level was assembled, with legislated entitlements replacing the discretionary judgements implicit in the distinction between deserving and undeserving poor. Even so, the moral overtones that characterised these earlier periods still exert an influence on some theories of poverty and an even more powerful impact on the design of some anti-poverty policies. In order to understand why this is the case, it is necessary to examine how poverty is defined

and measured – the two are often confused or conflated – and this is one of the main goals of

this chapter. The following section examines how the concept of poverty has evolved over the last three centuries, while the next section reviews measurement issues, distinguishing between poverty line studies and those approaches that locate poverty within a broader living standards framework. This is followed by an examination of the problems associated with measuring the impact of the welfare state on poverty and some summary findings, while the final section summarises the main conclusions canvasses some of the issues that lie at the forefront of contemporary poverty research.