Evans School Policy Analysis & Research Group (EPAR)

Key Takeaways

• A survey of poverty indicators surfaced 139 candidates, of which 36 were ultimately selected for inclusion in the study based on indicator construction, use, and timeliness.

• The selected 36 poverty indicators relied primarily on 26 data sources, mainly household surveys and administrative government data.

• Most indicators relied on household survey data and used multidimensional indices to comprehensively measure poverty, aside from poverty line and poverty gap measures which relied exclusively on income and consumption.

• Indicators or indicator components were typically based on quantitative estimates of income or consumption, although an increasing number of measurements are instead classifying households according to deprivation of assets, food, or access to services and basic infrastructure.

• Overall, critics find that an emphasis on poverty line measurements has led to an incomplete understanding of poverty’s prevalence and trends over the last several decades (UN Special Rapporteur, 2020).

• No single indicator dominates on considerations of reliability, dimensions, depth or intensity, comparability, etc., but rather each measure involves tradeoffs.

• If the goal is to increase the utility of commonly used indicators, including those considering multiple dimensions of poverty, then investments focused on expanding the coverage, frequency, or scope of nationally representative household surveys is a necessary first step.

• Making cross-country comparisons using any poverty indicator runs the risk of using a common metric based on different data sources and collected in different years that may not fully reflect a household’s welfare. Indices which include multiple subcomponents may be more holistic, but even less reliable as the number of components requiring data increases.

Suggested citation:

Landscape Review of Poverty Measures. EPAR Technical Report #424 (2022). Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, University of Washington. Retrieved <Day Month Year> from https://epar.evans.uw.edu/research

This brief presents an overview of EPAR’s previous research related to gender. We first present our key takeaways related to labor and time use, technology adoption, agricultural production, control over income and assets, health and nutrition, and data collection. We then provide a brief overview of each previous research project related to gender along with gender-related findings, starting with the most recent project. Many of the gender-related findings draw from other sources; please see the full documents for references. Reports available on EPAR’s website are hyperlinked in the full brief. 

This four-part analysis describes the current suite of food security measures, then analyzes the respective relationships between food security and poverty, GDP, and crop yields using findings from in-depth literature reviews. Food security measures are criticized for inaccurately characterizing food security at individual, household, and national scales, yet guidelines exist to prescribe a food security measure for a given situation. Some authors see the potential of a combination of indicators that apply at different scales rather than a single, universal food security measure. Limited literature exists on the relationship between food security and poverty, GDP, or crop yields. The relationship between food security and poverty is particularly challenging because neither term has a consistent definition, and the limited literature suggests a lack of consensus among experts. Little empirical research exists on the relationship between food security and GDP, though studies generally note an association between the two Studies that evaluate food security and crop yields provide limited evidence that the two are associated, though many studies use measures of crop yield as food security indicators and vice versa. More research is needed to establish whether there are preferred food security measurement tools for specific scales and situations, and to further explore the relationship between food security and poverty, GDP, and crop yields.