How Not to Count the Poor? A Reply to Reddy and Pogge

Abstract

A lay reader of the Reddy and Pogge chapter in this volume might be forgiven for suspecting that the World Bank’s data producers and researchers are real scoundrels. Reddy and Pogge (2002, 2008; see www.socialanalysis.org) assert that there are “deep flaws” in the Bank’s methods of measuring global poverty, and that the Bank has probably under-stated the extent of poverty in the world and over-stated global poverty reduction. 2 Furthermore, they contend that it is no accident that these flaws have gone unchecked for nearly 20 years; this reflects (they claim) the “low priority that has hitherto been attached to the global problem of persistent severe poverty.” Given that eliminating global poverty is the Bank’s self-declared goal, surely only scoundrels could have imparted deep flaws into the institution’s measures of progress in attaining that goal? (Yet others claim that we have systematically over-stated the extent of poverty in the world to keep ourselves employed fighting poverty. 3 It seems that measuring global poverty is a treacherous business for us scoundrels!)

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 111 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.