If we don’t count the poor, the poor don't count

The main tools most governments use to measure poverty grossly underestimate the scale of the problem and must be reset. This includes 'poverty lines', the minimum amounts of money people in a given place need to avoid poverty.

City mayors and national governments, the World Bank and the United Nations all use poverty lines to set policy. The Millennium Development Goals, for instance, use US$1.25 a day as the line that marks extreme poverty. The post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals will probably do the same.

But this poverty line and most other lines are fatally flawed. They only measure part of what it means to be poor, and that means they undercount, particularly in urban areas.

Fonte: IIED, 12/06/2014

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