Measuring poverty
overview about the measure of poverty
Poverty is measured in different ways by different bodies, both governmental and nongovernmental. Measurements can be absolute, which references a single standard, or relative, which is dependent on context. Poverty is widely understood to be multidimensional, comprising social, natural and economic factors situated within wider socio-political processes.
The main poverty line used in the OECD and the European Union is a relative poverty measure based on 60% of the median household income. The United States uses a poverty measure based on pre-tax income and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's "economy food plan" by which 11% of Americans are living in poverty, but this is disputed.
The World Bank defines poverty in absolute terms. It defines extreme poverty as living on less than US$1.90 per day. (PPP), and moderate poverty as less than $3.10 a day.
In 2008, 1.4 billion people had consumption levels below US$1.25 a day and 2.7 billion lived on less than $2 a day. And in 2025, an estimate around 831 million people lived in extreme poverty that lived less on 3.00$.
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This entry incorporates text from “Measuring poverty” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.