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The Nature and Causes of Poverty: An Overview

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• Andy Thorpe  

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In seeking to develop — to include rather than exclude — we need to ensure that; family incomes are sufficient to provide access to adequate levels of food, shelter and clothing, educational and employment opportunities exist for all, and government — both local and national — is open and participatory, rather than closed and dictatorial. The failure to provide satisfying incomes, human capital enhancing opportunities or democratic rights results in poverty — whether it be physical or intellectual poverty — and exclusion. In order to redress this, economic and social policy is of paramount importance. However, in order to measure the effectiveness of policy we need to articulate policy objectives (to set goals) and derive quantifiable indicators which allow us to evaluate just how far we have moved towards realising those goals 1 . Yet, as we shall see in this paper, deriving a universally accepted indicator is no easy task and each of the commonly deployed indicators used when assessing poverty levels has its own merits and demerits.

“Ten percent of the world’s population produces 70 per cent of its goods and services and receives 70 per cent of world income — an average of $30,000 per person. At the other extreme, half of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day” Collier and Dollar (2001, p.1787)

“ Our primary goal in development must be to reduce the disparities across and within countries... The key development of our time is the challenge of inclusion ”(James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, as cited in Todaro (2000, p.3))

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Thorpe, A. (2004). The Nature and Causes of Poverty: An Overview. In: Neiland, A.E., Béné, C. (eds) Poverty and Small-scale Fisheries in West Africa. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2736-5_2

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Topic: Poverty in Africa; Causes, Solutions and the Future

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