Only a few minutes from the five-star hotels of downtown Pattaya, Soon Ton lives in a small urban slum built on dusty wasteland. She is one of the increasing numbers of Thais who have left their rural villages to seek work in the cities. Her house, which she shares with her elderly mother, is a ramshackle mix of scavenged corrugated iron and plywood. There's no running water and she only recently got electricity in her home. However, by sifting through rubbish bins she is able to collect enough recyclable material to make more than 200 baht (£4) a day. This puts her well above the MDG and national poverty lines. So, in terms of absolute measures of poverty, Soon Ton is a success story and she is not counted among Thailand's poor.
Absolute measures of poverty based on income or consumption are attractive, as they are easily understood by policymakers and the wider population. They also provide a relatively easy way to gauge poverty levels and to measure success in poverty alleviation.
However reducing poverty to income alone is too simplistic, and fails to recognise wider human and social aspects of poverty. As Soon Ton's case also shows, it risks ignoring the needs of those who are poor, but not poor enough to be below a set income line.
Thailand, as a result of its own successful anti-poverty measures, actually imports regional poverty from bordering Laos, Burma and Cambodia. It is estimated that there are between 1.8 million and 3 million documented and undocumented workers and their families in the country. Therefore it is necessary to measure poverty in wider terms than just national borders – otherwise the failure of one country's anti-poverty measures could, through encouraging migration, result in an apparent fall in poverty rates and praise for their policies.
A recent Human Rights Watch report (pdf) details that many of these migrants "escape from the tiger only to meet the crocodile" – in searching for a better life in Thailand, they unwittingly enter an even more dangerous scenario.