CONCEPTS OF POVERTY AND THE POVERTY LINE. ESRI Working Paper No. 2, June 1987

This second working paper of the project on income distribution, poverty and usage of state services focuses on the various concepts of poverty and derived poverty lines which have been developed and applied in the literature. The first working paper surveyed previous studies which examined the extent and nature of poverty in Ireland. It was clear from that survey that a quite limited conceptual approach was common to almost all these studies, in that they used poverty lines based on official social security payment rates. The objective of the present paper is to describe and, to some extent, to assess various other conceptual approaches to the measurement of poverty and the derivation of a poverty line. A number of these approaches will be applied to the data currently being gathered on a large sample of Irish households