While there is worldwide agreement on poverty reduction as an overriding goal of development policy, there is little agreement on the definition of poverty. The paper reviews four approaches to the definition and measurement of poverty - the monetary, capability, social exclusion and...

This paper will briefly survey the monetary approach to poverty measurement - a set of techniques and methodologies, adopted mostly by economists, based on the identification of poverty with a shortfall in a monetary indicator and the "objective" derivation of a poverty line. In order to...

This paper reviews and analyses the literature on participatory methods in poverty analysis. The popularity of participatory poverty assessments has greatly increased in the last decade, and a growing number of development agents is adopting some form of participatory methodology. This spread...

This paper aims at evaluating the empirical consequences of the theoretical debate on the nature of poverty, focusing in particular on the differences between Sen's capability approach and the mainstream monetary approach. The empirical analysis is performed using data from the ENNIV 1994 survey...

While there is world-wide agreement on poverty reduction as an overriding goal of development policy, there is little agreement on the definition of poverty. Four approaches to the definition and measurement of poverty are reviewed in this paper: the monetary, capability, social exclusion and...

The cost of energy in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as elsewhere, is an important policy issue, as shown by the concerns for energy affordability during the past harsh winter. Governments try to moderate the burden of energy expenditures that is experienced by households through subsidies to...

Currently popular multidimensional approaches to poverty face the challenge of being translated into effective poverty reduction strategies. Central to this challenge is identifying policy interventions that can generate mutually reinforcing outcomes across different dimensions. With this aim we...