Chronic vs Transient Poverty

Abstract or Introduction

Measuring poverty requires long time periods. Different from other macroeconomic variables like the GDP or the inflation rate of a country, which can be determined immediately and quite precisely at every point in time, it is not that straightforward to measure the level or degree of poverty. If we were to count all people below a certain poverty line at a particular time, we would know only half of the story behind those poor. Some one can fall below the poverty line in one period but climb above it in the next; on the other hand, some one can be persistently below the poverty line. Therefore it is not enough to take only one snapshot of the scenario but one has to take into account that people can be either chronically or transiently poor and that there is a lot of movement in and out of poverty. Commonly poverty is measured by looking at consumption of households rather than their incomes. The reason is that income in many cases is only difficult to capture precisely. A self-employed farmer may not have a monetary income but only his harvest, which can be only inaccurately translated into monthly incomes. However, his consumption of food is easy to determine and can also be properly reported. This aspect allows for tracking the households’ poverty level at their different states such that a farmer’s consumption before the harvesting season is most likely to be lower than after and thus his poverty level might change from below the poverty line to above it.This kind of household moves in and out of poverty depending on the season and therefore it is not enough to interview him only once. Figure 1 shows how income can develop over a time period of 5 units. Whereas individual 1’s income is persistently below the poverty line and it experiences permanent deprivation, individual 3 manages to escape poverty after the third period. On the other hand, individual 2’s income rises above the poverty line in period 2 but declines again after the third, which is the typical pattern of transient poverty. However, we do not know for sure what happened after the fifth and before the first period and therefore cannot draw unambiguous conclusions.
Considering the fact that poverty has two faces, one should analyse the shares of people that are chronically and transiently poor, respectively. Not only is this a correct measure of poverty but it also provides crucial information for the policymakers.