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Poverty is defined as the lack of sufficient money to meet basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter, but it encompasses more than just financial insufficiency, including poor health and low education levels. It can be categorized into various types, including cyclical poverty, which is temporary and often caused by external factors, and concentrated collective poverty, which is a more permanent state affecting specific demographic groups. The effects of poverty are detrimental to both individuals and society, highlighting the need for action to improve living conditions and access to resources.

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8 views2 pages

Document 1

Poverty is defined as the lack of sufficient money to meet basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter, but it encompasses more than just financial insufficiency, including poor health and low education levels. It can be categorized into various types, including cyclical poverty, which is temporary and often caused by external factors, and concentrated collective poverty, which is a more permanent state affecting specific demographic groups. The effects of poverty are detrimental to both individuals and society, highlighting the need for action to improve living conditions and access to resources.

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theospront
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Poverty is the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money to meet

basic needs including food, clothing and shelter. However, poverty is much more than not
having enough money. It is said to exist when people lack the means to satisfy their basic
needs. In this context, the identification of poor people first requires a determination of what
constitutes basic needs. These may be defined as narrowly as “those necessary for survival”
or as broadly as “those reflecting the prevailing standard of living in the community.” The
first criterion would cover only those people near the borderline of starvation or death from
exposure; the second would extend to people whose nutrition, housing, and clothing, though
adequate to preserve life, do not measure up to those of the population as a whole.
The World Bank Organization describes poverty in this way:
“Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see
a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not
having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time.
Poverty has many faces, changing from place to place and across time, and has been
described in many ways. Most often, poverty is a situation people want to escape. So,
poverty is a call to action -- for the poor and the wealthy alike -- a call to change the world so
that many more may have enough to eat, adequate shelter, access to education and health,
protection from violence, and a voice in what happens in their communities.”
The problem of definition is further compounded by the noneconomic connotations that the
word poverty has acquired. Poverty has been associated, for example, with poor health, low
levels of education or skills, an inability or an unwillingness to work, high rates of disruptive
or disorderly behavior, and improvidence. While these attributes have often been found to
exist with poverty, their inclusion in a definition of poverty would tend to obscure the relation
between them and the inability to provide for one’s basic needs. Whatever definition one
uses, authorities and laypersons alike commonly assume that the effects of poverty are
harmful to both individuals and society.

Several types of poverty may be distinguished depending on such factors as time or duration
(long- or short-term or cyclical) and distribution (widespread, concentrated, individual).
Cyclical poverty refers to poverty that may be widespread throughout a population, but the
occurrence itself is of limited duration. In nonindustrial societies (present and past), this sort
of inability to provide for one’s basic needs rests mainly upon temporary food shortages
caused by natural phenomena or poor agricultural planning. Prices would rise because of
scarcities of food, which brought widespread, albeit temporary, misery.
In contrast to cyclical poverty, which is temporary, widespread or “collective” poverty
involves a relatively permanent insufficiency of means to secure basic needs—a condition
that may be so general as to describe the average level of life in a society or that may be
concentrated in relatively large groups in an otherwise prosperous society. Both generalized
and concentrated collective poverty may be transmitted from generation to generation,
parents passing their poverty on to their children.
Concentrated collective poverty - In many industrialized, relatively affluent countries,
particular demographic groups are vulnerable to long-term poverty. In city ghettos, in regions
bypassed or abandoned by industry, and in areas where agriculture or industry is inefficient
and cannot compete profitably, victims of concentrated collective poverty are found. These
people, like those afflicted with generalized poverty, have higher mortality rates, poor health,
low educational levels, and so forth when compared with the more affluent segments of
society.
Similar to collective poverty in relative permanence but different from it in terms of
distribution, case poverty refers to the inability of an individual or family to secure basic
needs even in social surroundings of general prosperity. This inability is generally related to
the lack of some basic attribute that would permit the individual to maintain himself or
herself. Such persons may, for example, be blind, physically or emotionally disabled, or
chronically ill.

https://www2.gnb.ca/content/gnb/en/departments/esic/overview/content/what_is_poverty.htm
l

https://www.britannica.com/topic/poverty

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