ABSTRACT
Poverty is a concept Norwegians generally reserve for other parts of the world or the distant past. Still, the concept has increasingly surfaced in the media and public debate, directing attention at people or groups of people who have financial problems. There are probably many reasons for this. The concept of what is an unacceptably low standard of living will naturally depend on the general standard of living in society. As such the term 'low income' provides a more relevant association to what is meant by relative 'poverty' than the traditional definition of poverty. This is also the reason why the authors have used low income instead of poverty in the title of this work. The results mentioned so far refer exclusively to analyses of annual cross-sectional data and naturally provide no facts as to whether poverty is chronic or not.
