Measuring poverty: what's in the line?

Abstract

Despite a long pedigree that dates back to late Victorian England, the notion of a ‘poverty line’ – a welfare threshold expressed in monetary terms – is not without its problems. Critics contend that the idea of a discrete cut-off point separating the poor from the non-poor is conceptually flawed as poverty and well-being can best be seen as a continuum. There is, in fact, considerable movement into and out of poverty that studies relying on a fixed poverty line fail to capture. (...)Apesar de uma longa genealogia que remonta à passada Inglaterra vitoriana, a noção de