Conceptualizing Chronic Poverty

Does it Matter that we do not Agree on the Definition of Poverty? A Comparison of Four Approaches

“…Yet, these fluctuations can be of particular interest if they entail far-reaching consequences for the most vulnerable individuals (consider childhood poverty's consequences for future physical and cognitive development). If poor households are credit and insurance constrained, therefore, there is a case for shorter time periods that allow a greater differentiation between the chronic poor (variously defined as those always below a poverty line, or those, on average, below a poverty line; Hulme & Shepherd, 2003) and the transitory poor. These considerations, however, do not apply to all approaches equally, as some capability and social exclusion measures, though observed at one point in time, by their nature indicate long-term deprivation either because they have long-term consequences (e.g.…”

Poverty Transition and Persistence in Ethiopia: 1994–2004

“…Bane and Ellwood, 1986;Stevens, 1999;and Devicienti, 2003), statistical methods that model income or consumption with complex lag structure of the error terms (e.g. Lillard and Willis, 1978), and approaches that separate the chronic from transient component of poverty (Rodgers and Rodgers, 1991, Hulme and Shepherd, 2003, Jalan and Ravallion, 2000.…”

Why Are Some People Poor?

“…Such theories have so far been less systematically applied at a macro or societal level to developing countries under the assumption that they are of less relevance if (almost) everyone is poor. Important examples of approaches to poverty that have sought to bring in aspects of a more structuralist approach include (and this is not intended to be more than an indicative list): the livelihoods literature, which has emphasized asset accumulation (see for example, Moser, 1998, Krishna, 2006; the development of multi-dimensional poverty measures that include household assets (for example, Alkire and Foster, 2011;Alkire et al, 2015a, b); distributional questions raised in participatory poverty assessments (for example, Narayan et al, 1999); the literature on the concept of human well-being that has expanded the lens of poverty research to include relational (social and personal) aspects of human well-being (see for example, Gough and McGregor, 2007), and theorising related to 'welfare regimes' and the set of policies and institutions that support welfare improvement (see Wood and Gough, 2006); and the attention to assets that is also central to research on the intergenerational transmission of poverty and broader research on poverty dynamics (see for example, Hulme and Shepherd, 2003;Bird, 2007). Most notably, the empirical survey of longitudinal data sets in Dercon and Shapiro (2007) draws out the causes of remaining in (or escaping from) poverty that include changes in economic and social assets as well as structurally based factors such as social exclusion or discrimination and being located in remote or otherwise disadvantaged areas.…”