Doing without a poverty measure
Despite the much vaunted poverty alleviation programmes, we are still confused about the fundamental issues concerning the meaning of poverty and the approaches to address it. Some classify poor as those living on less than one dollar a day, some measures are based on daily calorie intake and yet some others use their own unreliable tools. The government's approach to poverty alleviation has focused on construction of roads and parks, where as others depend on the micro-credit as a tool to poverty alleviation. We need to discuss alternatives to the current measures and approaches to poverty alleviation, so as to seek both a viable subjective approach and more adequate objective measures of deprivation.
A definition of poverty that can be a useful starting point for considering alternative measures is that offered by English researchers Joanna Mack and Stewart Lansley, who describe poverty as an enforced lack of socially perceived necessities (Poor Britain (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 39). This is admirably brief, and it embodies two ideas that are central to any realistic definition of poverty: that poverty involves in-voluntary restrictions on choice, and that it is socially specific, grounded in a particular society or culture. The second point has a corollary: a measure of poverty is not only socially determined, but must also meet with community agreement if it is to have social legitimacy. Translating these criteria into a practical measure of poverty has proven to be no easy task.
Subjective approaches to a poverty measure
Subjective assessment holds out the promise of articulating what poverty means to those most directly affected by it. It thus potentially meets the two criteria above. And it also accords well with the often expressed desire for a measure that "removes the concept of poverty from an arbitrary exercise of judgment by 'experts,' politicians, and governments . . . and opens it up to a more democratic representation of interests" (R. Walker, "Consensual Approaches to the Definition of Poverty: Towards an Alternative Methodology," Journal of Social Policy 17:221).
The subjective approach to poverty is sometimes referred to as the "consensual approach," but that is misleading. When broad sections of the community are asked what they understand poverty to mean there is no consensus in the replies, no matter how precisely the questions are worded. A poverty line thus derived will surely be too sensitive to its particular methodology to be useful for policy purposes.
Usefulness of studies on identifying measure of poverty will clearly be greater if answers to subjective questions can be linked to objective indicators of deprivation. Following are two different approaches, in light of two criteria: that poverty is a situation in which choice is severely restricted, and that the judgments required to operationalise the concept of poverty must draw upon community understanding of what poverty means and what do the community members feel is necessary to alleviate their suffering - not the decision makers in Islamabad.
Objective measures of deprivation
1. Income and expenditure measures
The disadvantages of income and expenditure measures of poverty have been widely canvassed. The income measure of poverty only indirectly captures the material deprivation and social isolation that are at the heart of poverty for those who experience it. Amartya K. Sen comments: "The extent of real inequality of opportunities that people face cannot readily be deduced from the magnitude of inequality of incomes, since what we can or cannot do, can or cannot achieve, do not depend just on our incomes but also on the variety of physical and social characteristics that affect our lives and make us what we are"(Inequality Reexamined (Oxford University Press, 1992, p-28).
An alternative to income-based measurement which continues to receive attention is an expenditure-based mea-sure. Peter Travers and Sue Richardson describe its advantages thus: "Expenditure generates the flow of services from which material well-being is derived . . .. Generally, income is valued not for its own sake but for the ability it provides to buy goods and services. It is thus more satisfactory to measure directly the level of goods and services bought"(Living Decently: Material Well-Being in Australia, Oxford University Press, 1993, p-24.)
However, there are a number of limitations to using expenditure to gauge the standard of living. What actually matters is the level of consumption rather than of expenditure per se. Where a low level of expenditure represents the choice of consumers, we cannot draw inferences for their level of living. This is particularly important in the context of poverty, which is characterised by constraint, not by preference. Wealthy misers may spend little, but this does not make them poor. It may be useful to consider income and expenditure not as substitute measures of well-being, but as complementary. Using expenditure to supplement rather than replace income allows some account to be taken of the role of choice in distorting poverty measures derived from either alone. This is especially so if our interest lies in the living standards of particular groups in the population, for whom estimates of poverty have proved to be particularly sensitive to whether income or expenditure is used.
2. The constrained-income approach
If people are constrained by lack of resources from meeting all of their basic needs, they can legitimately be defined as poor. In constructing a measure of poverty, it is useful to think of a hierarchy of needs, beginning with food, clothing, shelter, and health, and extending upward from there. Hunger and homelessness demonstrate that some cannot adequately meet even the most basic needs. Once basic needs are met, other coping strategies come into play. Those who cannot afford new clothes buy second-hand clothing. Furniture or household appliances that wear out or break down are not replaced or repaired. Large utility bills and high prices of daily commodities are a constant source of anxiety and some people resort to corruption and crime to increase their income, because construction of roads and parks do not pay for fulfilling their basic needs.
These patterns suggest that one possible way of measuring deprivation is to identify what we can call a "constrained expenditure level," at which all income is spent in meeting basic needs, and none of it is devoted to purchasing or maintaining durable items, nor to expenditure on luxury items. Such an inability to engage in any discretionary expenditure links this method to the idea that poverty is an involuntary constraint on choice. This method utilises data on the absence of expenditures on durable goods and luxury items as a way of identifying inadequate income, as opposed to using information on the lack of ownership of certain durable items to indicate deprivation. It thus allows us to take account of the medium and longer-term perspectives within which people make purchases of durable items.
Instead of blindly rushing into draining resources on poverty alleviation we need to develop poverty-measuring tools that accurately measure the level of poverty and number of poor in Pakistan. However, we must keep in mind that in addition to the language of the poor themselves, at least four types of discourse can be distinguished - bureaucratic, moralising, dramatic and academic. Bureaucratic language concentrates on defining a poverty line drawn by foreign experts. The poor are those with incomes below a given level. Moralising language is very different. It makes a judgment about the behaviour of the poor, depicting them either as irresponsible, dangerous and lacking in motivation, or as unfortunate, innocent and needy. But they don't have any tool to gauge as to how much behaviour has changed after a certain period of intervention. In the 1980s and 1990s dramatic language has played a major role in securing material aid for the poor and, more generally, in rousing public opinion.
The language of the poor is the language in which those directly concerned describe their situation. Their voices do not reach us directly, nor do we shape our strategies accordingly. The language of the poor is important in two ways. It provides us with the insider's view of a social situation as actually experienced. Do the poor still consider poverty alleviation programmes relevant to their needs? Do they feel superfluous or forgotten? Do they use the term poverty to describe their situation? However, it also enables us to assess their state of mind. The image of the victim, which everyday language employs as if it were self-evident, is in strong contrast to the fighting spirit of many vulnerable households.
In public and political debate, all these languages and measures conflict. The clash between them reflects the roles of the various parties concerned - politicians, civil servants, academics, NGOs - and the positions they adopt, but it also reveals fundamentally different views of poverty and approaches to the problem. Of course, there cannot be a single standard against which to measure poverty of all, but certainly there could be a valid and reliable tool to for measuring the level of poverty. Nevertheless, do we have it?
Everyone agrees that people facing hunger and starvation are poor. The differences arise when the term is applied to modern forms of inequality. This wider use gives rise to considerable confusion. Poverty is now no longer an absolute threat to physical existence (subsistence poverty) but as the situation of people who do not achieve the standard of living that is usual in their own society and are therefore unable to participate in it. Poverty implies the existence of social inequality but does not follow automatically from it. If we define those in the bottom 10% or 20% income bracket as poor, then there will always be poor people. However, the bottom 10% or 20% in a very rich country can be prosperous. The term does not only denote the relative disadvantage of one group compared with others, it implies a threshold. A household is considered poor when its income is below a certain level and its members are thereby deprived of the material and other conditions necessary for proper participation in the society in which they live. However, none of the poverty alleviation efforts is geared to target those bottom 10-15 per cent of the population.
All of the present approaches are open to serious objections. For example, the poverty level that should really be taken as a reference in Pakistan is too low to allow full participation to the poorest of the poor in society. Conversely, the prevalent approaches can lead to groups whose members live comfortably being classified as poor. The drawback of the government approach is that it still follows the top down approach where the policy makers in Islamabad decide that pavement of streets is the best tool to poverty alleviation than developing human resources. Finally, it is very hard to say what goods and services are really necessary to address poverty in our society. Not having a micro-enterprise and not owning a television set are not necessarily the result of poverty
Real understanding of the root causes of poverty, the tools to measure and the approaches to address it have been eclipsed by other priorities of the government, donors and the poverty alleviation related organisations. The issue is a political football. Every quarter is busy in deriving advantage in the name of fighting poverty rather than committing to understanding its complexities. Moreover, the argument cannot be solved by a straightforward appeal to the "facts" because the inaccurate statistics are open to interpretation by those who rush into different activities rather than setting out to define the characteristics of the poor and the required approach to address their needs.
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