Chronic poverty measures

This chapter surveys the recent literature on ‘chronic poverty’, tracing the evolution of this concept over time. It builds on the distinction between transient and longer term poverty. The focus of this chapter is on the methodological development showing how the unidimensional poverty measures were extended to include poverty spells. We focus on extensions based on the Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke (1984) measure, including multidimensional extensions that account for chronicity. The chapter shows how the earlier poverty counting exercise has become more complex not only in the definition of poverty but also in requiring the evaluator’s choice of values of several parameters besides requiring longitudinal data on several dimensions over a long enough time period for meaningful policy analysis.