Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya SenVolume I: Ethics, Welfare, and Measurement$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.
Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen: Volume I: Ethics, Welfare, and Measurement

Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur

Print publication date: 2008

Print ISBN-13: 9780199239115

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2009

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199239115.001.0001

ContentsFRONT MATTER
Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. date: 29 October 2020

On Ultrapoverty *

On Ultrapoverty *

Chapter:
(p.311) Chapter 17 On Ultrapoverty*
Source:
Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen
Author(s):

Sudhir Anand (Contributor Webpage)

Christopher Harris

Oliver Linton

Publisher:
Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199239115.003.0018

Lipton (1983) defined an individual to be ‘ultrapoor’ if and only if: (i) his calorie intake falls below 0.8 of the intake appropriate for his age, sex, and activity group; and (ii) his foodshare exceeds 0.8. of the appropriate foodshare. This chapter evaluates Lipton's concept of ultrapoverty. This is done by relating it to the well-established welfare indicator ‘total expenditure’, on the one hand, and to a wide range of housing and other non-monetary indicators on the other. The chapter agues that: (i) while calorie intake does contain important poverty information, it contains less poverty information than total expenditure; and (ii) foodshare contains very little poverty information. Hence, neither of the components of Lipton's double criterion is, on its own, a good criterion for poverty. It further argues that while the double 0.8 (or ‘double-eighty’) criterion may have some merits over each of its components, it is nonetheless inferior to a poverty criterion based simply on total expenditure. A particular feature of the analysis is the chapter's use of non-parametric methods to assess the local strength of the association between calorie intake and foodshare, respectively, against total expenditure.

Keywords:   ultrapoverty, poverty, undernourishment, calorie intake, foodshare, double-eighty criterion, total expenditure per capita, welfare indicator, Lipton

Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .