The degree of poverty in individual countries Essay

The degree of poverty in individual countries - Essay Example The United Nations World Summit on Social Development passed a declaration, â€Å"Copenhagen Declaration† which defines poverty as â€Å"a state characterized by harsh deficiency of essential human needs, including safe drinking water, food, health, education, sanitation facilities, and information.† When people do not have anything to eat, have access to health facilities- they are considered poor regardless of their level of income. This is the social definition of poverty and does is problematic at times as in this regard, most people living in developing and underdeveloped countries of the world will judged as poor. The Statistical definition yields more relevant results on how poverty should be measured. Using statistical measures, two methods are mostly used to describe poverty. These are Relative Measurement of poverty and Absolute Measurement of Poverty. Both of these measures rely on consumption or income values getting information to accumulate statistics on i mpoverishment much enhanced. The simplest way of measuring the degree of poverty in individual countries is Relative property measure. By using this method, the whole population is classified in order of their per capita income. Then the bottom 10% is believed to be ‘impoverished’ or ‘indigent’. This method is well for country-wide measurements, but it has some great drawbacks in worldwide use. If, for instance a 10% relative poverty extent was applied in a universal setting.