Poverty, inequality and health

Abstract

The World Summit on Social Development in 1995 was a remarkable historical event. The largest gathering yet of world leaders – 117 heads of state or government – signed the Copenhagen Declaration and, in doing so, pledged to make the eradication of poverty one of their overriding objectives. The declaration is not restricted to mass poverty in developing countries in the so-called Third World; it also urges governments to eliminate poverty in developed and otherwise wealthy countries. This chapter will discuss the definition and measurement of poverty in relation to the Copenhagen Declaration. In the first part, the theoretical definition and empirical operationalisation of poverty is discussed. The basic argument here is that the UN declaration does not contain a sufficiently strict definition of poverty, which in turn hampers the ability to operationalise and measure poverty in a consistent way. Thereafter, some aspects of the use of longitudinal data in the analysis of poverty are touched upon. The chapter continues by presenting a longitudinal analysis of economic standard and health in Sweden. The implications of the theoretical discussion and empirical findings are finally discussed. Even though poverty must be one of the concepts that has been defined most often, it still can be regarded as rather badly defined. There are, at least, two main problems that obscure our understanding. First, the theoretical definition is often confused with the empirical operationalisation (ie the definition of the poverty line). For example, to say that those with an income under 50% of the median equivalent disposable income are poor is not a definition of poverty; it is an empirical operationalisation aimed at dividing the population into two subgroups, the poor and the non-poor.