Microeconomics › Section O · Poverty and economic inequality › Topic O.1
Drawing the poverty line
Before anyone can argue about how to reduce poverty, someone has to decide who counts as poor. The US answer rests on a 1960s food-budget rule, and how that line is drawn changes the poverty rate by millions of people.
In this topic
- Poverty is not the same as inequality
- Orshansky's food-budget rule
- Thresholds and guidelines
- Worked example: living on the line
- Six decades of the official rate
- Who is poor
- What the official line misses
- The Supplemental Poverty Measure
- Worked example: one family, two measures
- Relative and international lines
- Common mistakes to avoid
- Key takeaways
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