ABSTRACT
What do we mean by the words poor and poverty? I will first state my definition and then present the supporting arguments. I define poverty as a situation where people lack the economic resources to realize a set of basic functionings (cf. Sen, 1985, 1993). Functionings are what a person is or does, e.g. being healthy, visiting friends, or living in a decent home. The definition focuses on what a person is capable of doing or being (given her resources and circumstances), not on the functionings that are actually achieved. A crucial aspect of poverty is that it is enforced. A healthy and able person who is living in squalid circumstances even though she has the means to improve her situation, cannot be considered poor. Moreover, not all situations where basic functionings cannot be realized come under the concept of poverty, but only those where this is due to a lack of economic resources. That is, a person who is unable to visit friends could be considered poor if the reason is that she cannot pay the bus fare, but not if she is connected to a life-support machine or is agoraphobic. Yet, depending on circumstances and abilities, different person’s may need different amounts of resources to realize the same set of functionings. Handicapped person’s may require a specially adapted and therefore expensive car to visit friends. For healthy and able people the most important variable influencing their resource requirements is probably the size and composition of the household they live in.
