The ethical poverty line: a moral quantification of absolute poverty

Abstract

Responding to the Millennium Development Goal challenge to halve ‘extreme’ poverty by 2015, it has been argued that we have a moral duty to ensure that economic growth benefits the world's poorest. However, this morality is only partial if absolute poverty is defined by the somewhat arbitrary $1-a-day poverty line. If this moral duty exists, then we need to develop a morally defensible poverty line. Drawing on established health literature, this paper innovates by linking an analysis of world consumption to life outcome data, all from current World Bank datasets, to derive such a poverty line, termed here the Ethical Poverty Line (epl). The epl is comparable to the $2-a-day poverty line increasingly quoted by the World Bank. At this level, the epl not only quantifies the substantial scale of socioeconomic change needed to eliminate absolute poverty but also raises challenging questions about the scale of over-consumption in the developed world.