IDST 1001H Chapter Notes - Chapter 24: International Labour Organization, Sub-Saharan Africa, Extreme Poverty
14 Jun 2018
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From Textbook Chapter 24:
• Poverty:
• Narrow versus broad:
• A narrow view is easily measured through things like national poverty
lines based on income
• A broad view explores multiple facts and the processes that create,
maintain, or reduce poverty
• Material and non-material deprivations
• Absolute and relative poverty:
• Absolute perspectives interpret poverty as when people cannot meet
minimum physical needs due to lack of income
• Relative perspectives believe poverty must be defined relative to others in
a society
• Relational poverty is not just income inequality, but unequal power
relations between different groups in a society
• Objective and subjective measurements:
• Objective measurements are specified by researchers who decide who is
poor and non-poor according to definitions and surveys
• Subjectives measurements are made by people of their own status and
others in their community, this has the disadvantage of different criteria
that change to define poverty
• Human agency versus social structure:
• Agency-based approaches benefit from simplicity and precision of
thinking in terms of behaviour and experiences of poverty
• Structuralists argue units of analysis are multiple, and behaviours are
complex and not predictable
• How many poor people are there and where do they live?
• Extreme poverty has decreased in all regions of the world since 1980
• Greatest numbers of extremely poor people live in South Asia and sub-Saharan
Africa
• Between 1.2 and 1.6 billion people were extremely poor around 2010
• Poverty is deepest in sub-Saharan Africa
• 2.5 to 2.9 billion people live on under $2 a day
• Brief History of Development as poverty reduction:
• International Labour Organization proposed a basic needs approach in early
1970s that governments should prioritize policies, budgets, and actions to ensure
disadvantaged people were able to access a minimum level of well-being
• In 1974 World Bank promoted a greater focus on rural development than urban
industrialization
• Through late 1970’s to 1990 many believed economic growth was the solution
• In 1990 World Bank said poverty was economic as well as social, United Nations
published first Human Development Report, promoting human development as
the goal rather than economic growth
• Going into the 2000’s development started to be looked at as development and
poverty eradication
• Human development needed to focus equally on economic growth, and on social factors
• Amartya Sen’s Framework for Conceptualizing Human Development
• Functionings: various things someone values doing or being
• Capability or freedom: alternative combinations of functionings that are feasible
to achieve
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