The Human Development Perspective

Abstract

Concerns with identifying people affected by poverty and the desire to measure it have at times obscured the fact that poverty is too complex to be reduced to a single dimension of human life. It has become common for countries to establish an income-based or consumption-based poverty line. Although income focuses on an important dimension of poverty, it gives only a partial picture of the many ways human lives can be blighted. Someone can enjoy good health and live quite long but be illiterate and thus cut off from learning, from communication and from interactions with others. Another person may be literate and quite well educated but prone to premature death because of epidemiological characteristics or physical disposition. Yet a third may be excluded from participating in the important decision making processes affecting her life. In all these cases, the deprivations cannot be fully captured by the level of each individual’s income. Also, people perceive deprivation in different ways—and each person and community defines whatever deprivation faced and disadvantages that affect their lives in varied ways such that any concurrence is a coincidental matter.