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Consensual Approaches to Poverty Lines and Social Security*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2009

J.H. Veit-Wilson
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Abstract

The principal problematic issue in all poverty measures is the source and status of the standards of needs and deprivation. Rejection of minimum subsistence or quasi-absolute approaches to defining poverty, and acceptance of the social relativism of poverty, logically demand that the indicators of deprivation equally be derived from the society in question and not be prescribed for it by ‘experts’. The paper reviews the policy implications of the distinction between deprivation and poverty, and discusses two principal approaches to empirical methods of establishing ‘consensual’ measures of poverty: the income proxy method and the deprivation indicator method. The paper also distinguishes sociologically-based poverty lines from politically-based social security scales, outlining some important aspects of the theoretical and methodological relations between them.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , April 1987 , pp. 183 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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