Reconceptualising Poverty Measurement for Sustainable Development: Review of the Literature

Abstract

At the turn of the millennium, problems of poverty measurement was reopened in development discourse both in the global North and South as recent poverty trends seem to be at variance with sustainable development agenda. As the post 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) takes toll,  there is need to re-examine some empirical and theoretical issues in the dynamics of poverty measurement as well as  patterns of imprecision and key external and internal variables involved to determine the suitability of such measurement tools in alleviating poverty. Content analysis was deployed as a methodology to examine some of these measurement tools which include; the World Bank’s $1-Per-Day Poverty Line, the Money-metric methods, the Income and Consumption Measures, the Asset Indicators and Deprivation method. Findings suggest the superficiality of existing poverty measurement tools as they predominantly emphasize material poverty and fail to critically identify non- monetary poverty indices. The paper suggests alternative pro poor models such as Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and makes some policy recommendations.

Keywords; Poverty  Measurement, Inequality, Poverty, Sustainable Development.