The Asset Poverty Line and Measures of Structural Poverty
This section takes first steps toward developing forward-looking poverty measures
that are informative about the nature of long-term, structural poverty. After
defining the concept of an asset poverty line, this section shows how the asset
poverty line can be used to identify those households who lack the assets that, on
average, generate a non-poor level of expenditure or income. Such measures are
informative about the likely prospects of a household possessing a given asset
portfolio, given past asset productivity, much like increasingly-popular vulnerability
measures (Christiaensen and Boisvert, 2000; Christiaensen and Subbarao
forthcoming).