Giving Compass' Take:

• In order to accurately assess our progress towards meeting the Sustainable Development Goals, Peter Edward and Andy Sumner encourage us to abandon arbitrary measurements that define poverty.

• Who designates the measurements that define poverty? How do they create an unproductive tendency towards complacency? What can you do to draw awareness towards the widespread global poverty that still exists prevalently?

• Learn more about how the official poverty measure badly misrepresents American poverty.

Ending global poverty has long been an aspiration of the United Nations. This aim forms a centre-piece of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which set a target to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere” by the year 2030.

On first glance, it appears that the SDG agenda is within close reach, as since 1990, global poverty at the $1.90-per-day mark has more than halved, plummeting from 1.9 billion to about 0.7 billion. The decline in the global poverty headcount has been underpinned by dramatic growth in global output and consumption, both of which have more than doubled since the end of the Cold War. Alston’s concern is that by relying predominantly on these headcounts, the UN lends its support to a self-congratulatory narrative of poverty reduction that is highly misleading and that these headline figures provide substantial backing to the idea that economic growth alone will provide an eventual end to poverty.

Since all international poverty lines are somewhat arbitrary, one major point of contention is over-reliance on any poverty line as a basis for drawing sweeping conclusions about either the current state of global poverty, or the interaction between poverty levels and economic growth. Just a 10-cent difference in the choice of poverty line can add a staggering 100 million to the global poverty headcount. It is important therefore to acknowledge that how we consider the statistics is central to the conclusions that we draw, as the specific poverty line we choose to adopt can significantly alter the narrative.

Yet if the SDG agenda is taken seriously, it is time to abandon the focus on arbitrary poverty indicators, and rather begin recognising, discussing and addressing the political challenges that come with improving the governance of economic growth.

Read the full article about misleading measurements that define poverty by Peter Edward and Andy Sumner at Global Policy Journal.