HSS 1101 Lecture : HSS 1101 Final Review
15 May 2018
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Lecture 8.1: Determinants of Health (Simple Measure of Low Income and Poverty)
What is Socioeconomic Status (SES)
-Some kind of combination of one, two or three of:
-Income
-Education
-Social Class
Low Income…
-Lack of access to nutritious food
-Lack of access to a vehicle
-Restriction to problematic neighborhoods
-Limited educational opportunities
-Limited access to health services (even in socialized medicine)
Food Desert: An urban area in which it is difficult to buy affordable or good-quality fresh food
Food Deserts in Edmonton
Food Desert (No car and no supermarket store within a mile
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Map suggest that ones inability to acess fresh food and ones tendency to be obesity exists
Poverty
-the state of being poor
-What does it mean when we say that 21% of children in the USA live beneath the poverty line?
Or that 10.2% of Danish children live in poverty? Do those statistics mean that Denmark is twice
as wealthy as the USA? Is a poor Person in Denmark as similarly deprived as a poor person in
the USA?
-A standard definitions of a poverty line is the minimum level income deemed necessary to
achieve an adequate standard of living. But what is an adequate standard of living
-Food?
-Housing?
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-Education?
-Entertainment?
-Health?
-Services?
Relative Poverty: below a threshold computed from within the population of interest
-Economic distance (how far from the lowest or the average)
Absolute Poverty: defined in terms of the minimal requirements necessary to afford a basic
standard of living
Relative Poverty
-Example: households with an accumulated income less than a percentage of the median
income (usually 50% or 60%) are living in poverty
-By definition, regardless of overall wealth of the society there will always be someone living in
poverty
Absolute Poverty
-(sometimes used to mean “extreme poverty”, which is not how i'm using it here)
-Functionally, it's the absence of enough resources (money) to secure basic resources of life
-According to 1995 World Summit on Social Development, “absolute poverty” means a
“condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe
drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not
only on income but also on access to services.
-But how do you operationalize that?
-One attempt defines absolute poverty as having any two of:
1. Food: BMI must be above a certain threshold (usually 16)
2. Safe drinking water: water must not come solely from rivers and ponds and must be
available nearby (less than 15 minute walk each way)
3. Sanitation Facilities: Toilets must be near and accessible
4. Health: Treatment must be received for serious illnesses and pregnancy
5. Shelter: Homes must have fewer than four people living in each room. Floors must not
be made of dirt, mud or clay
6. Education: Everyone attends school or learns to read
7. Information: Everyone must have access to newspapers, radios, televisions, Computers,
or telephones at home
8. Access to services: vague access to education, health, legal, social and financial
services
Global Poverty Line
-The most commonly applied poverty threshold is the so-called global poverty line which is
computed by the World Bank to reflect the need to compare national poverty lines across many
nations. It has been in use since about 1990
-The Global poverty line is based solely on the cost of living, and is assessed by computing the
global prices of key commodities
-Up until 2008, the global poverty line was 1 U.S. dollar per day
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