Debates on the Measurement of Global Poverty

Sudhir Anand is Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and Official Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford. His recent research has focussed on inequality, poverty, and undernutrition; human development; population ethics; health economics; and the theory and measurement of economic inequality. He has been Visiting and Adjunct Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and served as Acting Director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. He has also been Visiting Professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and is currently Visiting Professor at the Harvard Medical School. He chaired the WHO scientific committee on health systems performance assessment. Paul Segal is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies and a Junior Research Fellow at New College, Oxford. His research covers global poverty and inequality, and the economics of resource-rich countries, with a particular focus on the distribution of income. Prior to completing his DPhil at Nuffield College, Oxford, in 2006, he was a Research Fellow at Harvard University's Global Equity Initiative, and a Consultant Economist at the UNDP, where he worked on the Human Development Report 2002. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas in Mexico City. JJoseph E. Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 and is University Professor at Columbia University, where he founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue in 2000. He was Chair of President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors from 1995-97, and Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997-2000. He is also Chair of the University of Manchester's Brooks World Poverty Institute and is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. His best known recent publications include Making Globalization Work (2006), Fair Trade for All (2005), Globalization and its Discontents (2002) and The Roaring Nineties (2003).

While there are many publications on alleviating global poverty, this compliation of papers focuses on the fundamental issue of what constitutes poverty and how it is measured. This is an important concern since one fo the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is halving world poverty by the year 2015. Whether or not this goal has been or will be reached depends fundamentally on the definition of poverty, which in turn influences the measurement of poverty itself.... This volume addresses an important, challenging issue and will be of value to students and researchers of development economics and world poverty.

• Debates in the Measurement of Global Poverty: Introduction ; PART I ; 1. The Debate on Globalization, Poverty and Inequality: Why Measurement Matters ; 2. How not to count the poor ; 3. Raising the Standard: the War on Global Poverty ; 4. Irrelevance of the $1 a Day Poverty Line ; 5. Use of Country Purchasing Power Parities for International Comparisons of Poverty Levels: Potential and Limitations ; 6. Measuring poverty in a growing world (or measuring growth in a poor world) ; 7. Poverty or income distribution: Which do we want to measure? ; 8. A note on the (mis)use of national accounts for estimation of household final consumption expenditures for poverty measures ; 9. Unequal development in the 1990s: Focusing on gaps in human capabilities ; 10. Improving Measurement of Latin American Inequality and Poverty with an Eye to Equitable Growth Policy ; PART II ; 11. The Changing Nature of Urban Poverty in China ; 12. China is poorer than we thought ; 13. Poverty Decline in India in the 1990s : A Reality And Not An Artefact ; 14. Living Standards in Africa