ABSTRACT
The access to basic necessities is an approach to more directly measure people’s poverty. The approach is inspired by Rowntree (1902). It is a widely applied concept globally, both in developing and developed countries. This chapter presents the absolute poverty approach and discusses the issues involved when applying the approach. The approach’s influence on world poverty lines, such as earnings of 1 or 2 dollars a day, will be presented. Implementations of the approach will be exemplified with estimations for the whole world, for regions of the world, as well as country-level comparisons. Both the spatial structure of absolute poverty and its temporal development will be the focus of the empirical part of the chapter.
