Toward Pro-Poor Global Poverty Measurement

Abstract

Having already argued that new poverty measures and systems of poverty measurement should be developed through a process of public reason, and then recommended both values and desiderata that should inform future global poverty measurement, it might strike the reader as presumptuous for me to offer further thoughts on the topic. It is with great hesitancy that I proceed to make substantive recommendations for future global poverty measurement. This is not a comprehensive view, but rather a set of suggestions for both the form of global poverty measurement and its content. I certainly intend these only as suggestions that should be considered in inclusive processes of public reasoning. If I have overstepped my bounds, it is because I am skeptical whether and to what extent voices of marginalized and excluded people will be heard in the next phase of conversations about poverty measurement and development goals. I believe these recommendations would benefit those populations a great deal and are, in part, drawn from the interests and perspectives they have had the limited opportunity to articulate.