Debates on the Measurement of Global Poverty
- Overview
- Table of Contents
The international community's commitment to halve global poverty by 2015 has been enshrined in the first Millennium Development Goal. How global poverty is measured is a critical element in assessing progress towards this goal, and different researchers have presented widely-varying estimates.
Topics covered include the controversies surrounding the definition of a global poverty line; the use of purchasing power parity exchange rates to map the poverty line across countries; and the quality, and appropriate use, of data from national accounts and household surveys.
Both official and independent estimates of global poverty have proved to be controversial, and this volume presents and analyses the lively debate that has ensued. The chapters in this volume address a range of problems in the measurement and estimation of global poverty, from a variety of viewpoints.
About the Editors
Sudhir Anand
Professor of Economics
Oxford University
Sudhir Anand is Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and Official Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford. His recent research has focussed on inequality, poverty, and undernutrition; human development; population ethics; health economics; and the theory and measurement of economic inequality. He has been Visiting and Adjunct Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and served as Acting Director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. He has also been Visiting Professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and is currently Visiting Professor at the Harvard Medical School. He chaired the WHO scientific committee on health systems performance assessment.
Paul Segal
Research Fellow
Oxford Institute for Energy Studies
Paul Segal is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies and a Junior Research Fellow at New College, Oxford. His research covers global poverty and inequality, and the economics of resource-rich countries, with a particular focus on the distribution of income. Prior to completing his DPhil at Nuffield College, Oxford, in 2006, he was a Research Fellow at Harvard University's Global Equity Initiative, and a Consultant Economist at the UNDP, where he worked on the Human Development Report 2002. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at the Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas in Mexico City.
Joseph Stiglitz
Co-President
Initiative for Policy Dialogue
Joseph E. Stiglitz is co-founder and Executive Director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, for which he also co-chairs the macroeconomics, Capital Market Liberalization, and Intellectual Property task forces. Dr. Stiglitz holds joint professorships at Columbia University's Economics Department and its Business School. From 1997 to 2000 he was the World Bank's Senior Vice President for Development Economics and Chief Economist. From 1995- 97 he served as Chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers and as a member of President Clinton's cabinet. From 1993 to 1995 he was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. He was previously a professor of economics at Stanford, Princeton, Yale, and All Souls College. Dr. Stiglitz is a leading scholar of the economics of the public sector and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 in addition to the American Economic Association's biennial John Bates Clark Award in 1979. His work has been recognized through his election as a fellow to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the British Academy.
