"The U.N. Aims to Cut Poverty in Half, Even as the Experts Wonder How to Measure It"
by Alan B. Krueger

Source: The New York Times, February 3, 2005.
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FB0F16F6385F0C708CDDAB0894DD404482

             When society sets an economic goal, we also have to figure out how to measure our progress in meeting that goal. If one goal is economic growth, we have to create an indicator—like change in real gross domestic product—to measure how much the economy is growing. If full employment and price stability are economic goals, then we develop measures such as unemployment rates and the consumer price index to evaluate our economic performance. The same is true of poverty. The United Nations, according to this article by economist Alan Krueger, has set a goal of reducing the number of people in poverty in the world by one half between the years 1990 and 2015. The trick is to figure out how to measure progress.

             How many poor people are there in the world? As we learned in chapter 30, this is a hard question to answer because you have to come up with a definition of who is and who isn't poor. If an absolute standard is used, policy analysts have to determine a poverty line, a minimum level of income needed to rise above poverty. We define poverty by its opposite, that is, by defining how much money you need to NOT be poor. Anyone with less is poor.

             Although the monetary value of the U.N. poverty line is $1 per day, this is converted into local currencies by calculating the price of a standard bundle of goods in each country.

• What does it mean to say that "Poverty lines are as much political as scientific constructions?"
• What are some of the problems with the U.N.'s method of measuring poverty, according to the article?
• Where has progress toward alleviating poverty been made? Which regions have been left behind? What implications does this have for setting policy goals?