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

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This brief reviews the various definitions of global public goods (GPGs) and regional public goods (RPGs) found in the literature and provides examples of each in six frequently discussed sectors: environment, health, knowledge, security, governance, and infrastructure. We identify multiple alternative definitions that have gained some traction in the literature, but GPGs are generally agreed to exhibit publicness in consumption, distribution of benefits, and decision-making. Because policy choices determine what is and what is not a GPG, there cannot be a fixed list of such goods; some always have the property of global publicness, while others have over time changed from being local or national to being global in terms of benefits and costs. GPGs are thus redefined as goods that are in the global public domain. GPG and RPG financing mechanisms include payments by users and beneficiaries, taxes, fees, and levies, private funding by non-profit corporations, profit-making firms, and philanthropic individuals and organizations, national and international public resources, and partnerships between several sources of financing. We conclude with an analysis of trends in GPG and RPG financing through Official Development Assistance (ODA) using time series data from the OECD’s Creditor Reporting System and other sources. We find that 14% of ODA in 2014 was allocated to sub-sectors labelled by Reiner et al. as GPGs, while 15% of ODA was allocated to RPGs, and that GPG and RPG spending has steadily increased from 2002-2014.