Vad är ’fattigdom’ och hur bör den mätas?

Abstract

We are used to headlines saying that poverty increases, but poverty has in fact not increased in Sweden since the 1990s. What has increased is instead the use of theoretically questionable and diluted measures of poverty. We describe the basic theories behind different types of poverty measures, and argue that we should use one that is grounded in ordinary people’s conception of poverty. Such measure should be based on the notion of shortage of economic or material resources, and be operationalised as either material deprivation or ‘absolute income poverty’, where incomes are related to socially determined necessities. Such a ‘pure’ poverty measure should complement but not be confounded with other important societal phenomena, such as inequality or level-of-living; differ from them in the definition just as they differ theoretically.