2009 Reports

Irrelevance of the $1-a-Day Poverty Line

Srinivasan, T. N.

Whether or not an individual is deemed to be poor depends not merely on that individual's economic and non-economic endowments but also, equally, if not more importantly, the place of that individual in the socio-economic-political processes of the country of which he or she is a citizen. An important implication of this is that any meaningful indicator that distinguishes the poor from non-poor has to be multidimensional. Nonetheless, most widely used indicators, including the $1 a day poverty line, are unidimensional and are usually defined as a person's expenditure on consumption or, less often, income.