Poverty measurement: Orshansky's original measures and the development of alternatives.

摘要

This paper asserts that the continued reliance on Mollie's Measure (MM) in making official poverty estimates in the USA reflects the inventor's enduring pragmatism but also reflects the political and methodological difficulties associated with replacing the current measure with an alternative. The paper highlights the limitations of the official measure that spurred the development of alternative measures, and reports on the most comprehensive work on alternative poverty measurements to date, primarily conducted under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). It concludes that most of the methodological issues are resolved and thus, the remaining barriers to adopting the NAS alternative poverty measure are purely political.