In Search of a Representative Measure of Poverty

Poverty is not really a measure of outcome. Indeed many of the measures discussed in this chapter are based on income and income is quite clearly an input. Nevertheless an explicit objective of many policy interventions is to prevent or reduce poverty. It is probably the major objective of the social security system which takes a third of all public expenditure in the UK. It is an important consideration in fiscal policy and because poverty is at the heart of so many problems in modern Britain it is a relevant issue in the evaluation of almost all social and economic interventions.