While there is worldwide agreement on poverty reduction as an overriding goal of development policy, there is little agreement on the definition of poverty. The paper reviews four approaches to the definition and measurement of poverty - the monetary, capability, social exclusion and...

Currently popular multidimensional approaches to poverty face the challenge of being translated into effective poverty reduction strategies. Central to this challenge is identifying policy interventions that can generate mutually reinforcing outcomes across different dimensions. With this aim we...

This paper will briefly survey the monetary approach to poverty measurement - a set of techniques and methodologies, adopted mostly by economists, based on the identification of poverty with a shortfall in a monetary indicator and the "objective" derivation of a poverty line. In order to...

This paper reviews and analyses the literature on participatory methods in poverty analysis. The popularity of participatory poverty assessments has greatly increased in the last decade, and a growing number of development agents is adopting some form of participatory methodology. This spread...

This paper aims at evaluating the empirical consequences of the theoretical debate on the nature of poverty, focusing in particular on the differences between Sen's capability approach and the mainstream monetary approach. The empirical analysis is performed using data from the ENNIV 1994 survey...

Amartya Sen introduced the Capability approach in 1979 as a more appropriate theory of justice than existing theories in moral philosophy. The main features of the Capabilities approach and its operationalisation in the context of poverty analysis are discussed in this paper. The three broad...

The feasibility of operationalisation of the 'social exclusion' concept in developing countries is investigated in this paper. The origins of the approach in relation to the welfare state and unemployment status and its spread in Western Europe and developing countries are discussed briefly....

he gender sensitivity of indicators of health, nutrition, education, and composite indices, relevant to developing countries is assessed within the analytical framework of 'functionings'. A disaggregated under-10 female-male ratio (0-4 years and 5-9 years) appears to be a suitable indicator,...

In the context of targeting of state transfers based on income poverty lines, this study is concerned with the identification of households that may have been wrongly included in the target group. To this end, we investigate the relationship between self-declared private income and some 478...

The paper explores the conditions making for success in Human Development (HD) in developing countries. For this purpose it defines success in HD in a materialistic and reductionist way as being measured by progress in improving life expectancy and reducing infant mortality rates. Drawing on...