Absolute Poverty vs Relative Poverty

What is Poverty?

It is having no power, no control of your life and you live life as if it is your last. A country may not be able to support itself economically and so can lead to war or civil unrest. Poverty is often experienced by certain people of society e.g. certain social groups.

Absolute Poverty:

Absolute poverty measures the number of people living below a certain income threshold or the number of households unable to afford certain basic goods and services.

Relative Poverty:

Relative poverty measures the extent to which a household’s financial resources falls below an average income threshold for the economy. Although living standards and real incomes have grown because of higher employment and sustained economic growth over recent years, the gains in income and wealth have been unevenly distributed across the population.

Factors of Poverty

• Child Poverty
• Environmental Poverty
• Gender Equality
• Homelessness
• Lack of Food
• Maternal Health

The cycle of poverty has been described as a phenomenon where poor families become trapped in poverty for generations.

Because they have no or limited access to critical resources, such as

·         Education and

·         Financial services

Subsequent generations are also impoverished. There are multiple cycles of poverty-based on, among other things,

·         Economic

·         Social

·         Spiritual and

·         Geographical factors

Many cycles overlap or perpetrate new cycles and therefore any attempt to depict the cycle of poverty will be far more simplistic than realistic.

The figure on the left shows-in very simplistic terms-how a cycle of poverty related to hunger keeps a person or household poor in one of the world’s developing countries.