[lbo-talk] question on poverty and world bank's PPP

[Jeffrey Fisher]

just for the record, despite my quotation of a critique of the stats, (a) one of the things i was trying to say, perhaps not very effectively, was that the $1/day stat actually *does* incorporate a lot of the kinds of things people have expressed concerns about, and (b) that it's imperfect but seems to me to remain useful as a shorthand way of talking about extreme/"absolute" poverty. i deployed it in class today with the desired effect.

j

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
Sent: Mar 17, 2004 1:17 PM
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] question on poverty and world bank's PPP

Jeffrey Fisher wrote:


>i actually have hard copy of the UN's 2001 global report on human 
>settlements, which i've been flipping through to see how they flesh 
>out the concept of absolute poverty, and how they might bring 
>together data on access to resources (water, education, etc.) and 
>income.

To be fair to the World Bank, which is an impulse I don't feel every 
day, they do try to measure these things. The $1/day measure is a 
measure of extreme poverty, and hardly the last word on the subject, 
by their own admission. There's plenty of stuff available from their 
main poverty page <http://www.worldbank.org/poverty/index.htm>.

Doug
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