Defining Poverty: A Summary of Competing Models

Abstract

How we talk about poverty and low income is complicated by the competing methods for defining and measuring the phenomenon. In this article, I present a brief summary of the dominant methods currently in use by the governments of Canada and USA, and by the World Bank and large NGOs: absolute vs relative measures, low income cutoff (LICO), official poverty measure (OPM), global poverty line (GPL), human poverty index (HPI), and the multidimensional poverty index (MPI).