ABSTRACT

The catalogue of definitions of poverty appears to be very large and there is little consensus about the appropriate indicator of resources to be adopted (Atkinson, 1989). Clearly, the choice of definition is the starting point of any poverty-related study, and should not be left as a side issue. Furthermore, the definition of resources greatly influences the set of families identified as being in poverty and there is little overlap between the sets of poor obtained from alternative definitions (Anand and Harris, 1990; Glewwe and Van der Gaag, 1990; Chaudhuri and Ravallion, 1994).