Nature of Poverty

The nature of poverty can be described in many ways. The obvious way to explain poverty is the lack of income. However, in the deeper meaning, poverty also includes those who lack of security, healthcare, power, and other basic necessities. Poverty can be categorised in terms of absolute poverty and relative poverty. Absolute poverty is household based measure by income per year under a statistic developed by government which will aid those who are poor by giving them money depending on the number of members in the family on a yearly basis. While, relative poverty focus on people’s living with no statistic. For instance, if a family has 10 members but they have only 3 cars, they can be regarded as poor. Nevertheless, there are three common methods that use to measure the level of poverty.
The first method defines poverty as a lack of income, which can be measured by World Bank. The absolute poverty for this case is a cut up point above or below the certain amount of income. Yet, this method has a major drawback. Since it focuses solely on income and ignoring other important factors such as social well-being or the general welfare of people, this method fails to provide the whole aspect of poverty.
Secondly, UNDP measures poverty in terms of the lack of capability. It is known as Human Poverty Index that indicates the standard of living of the people in the country, which are life expectancy, life satisfaction, and footprint. This method provide not only deeper but also broader ways of measuring and assessing poverty. It looks pass the income factor and takes into consideration the non-monetary aspects, which generate the more well-rounded information and results. However, there are some critics that this method cannot truly measure the level of the poor since statistics and numerals are unable to measure people’s feelings. It is said that we cannot know how others feel unless we walk in their shoes, therefore, in order to get the accurate result, living with the