Measuring Poverty: Some Rebuttals of Easton

Robert Stephens, Charles Waldegrave, Paul Frater

This paper sets out to rebut Brian Easton’s portrayal of the work of the New Zealand Poverty Measurement Project as presented by Stephens, Waldegrave and Frater (SWF). We welcome comment and debate on the appropriate way to conceptualise poverty and the techniques for measuring poverty.

However, Easton is not concerned with the wider debate of whether poverty relates to the outcome of the economic, social and political process as measured through some set of deprivation or social indicator scales, or to an inadequate access to resources as indicated by low household disposable income.

Instead, he recycles already rebutted criticisms. SWF and Easton both use inadequate income as our concept of poverty, and use the same data source (the Household Economic Survey) in our statistical analyses. The differences lie in the method for setting the poverty line, the equivalence scales used and the internal logic of the measurement technique itself, and it is these issues that Easton focuses on.

We argue that Easton fails to understand the methodology underlying focus groups, the arithmetic of equivalence scales and the problems inherent in measuring poverty through time.