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Assessing Poverty and Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from West Bengal
Author(s) -
Williams Glyn
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
transactions of the institute of british geographers
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.196
H-Index - 107
eISSN - 1475-5661
pISSN - 0020-2754
DOI - 10.1111/j.0020-2754.1999.00193.x
Subject(s) - poverty , vulnerability (computing) , west bengal , empowerment , development economics , consumption (sociology) , culture of poverty , work (physics) , basic needs , value (mathematics) , economic growth , sociology , political science , economics , socioeconomics , social science , engineering , mechanical engineering , computer security , machine learning , computer science
Recent interest in poverty and poverty relief has included debates that have moved beyond narrow concerns of consumption and income generation. Sen's research on entitlements and capabilities revolutionized approaches to poverty in the 1980s, and his work has itself been open to critical appraisals that have stressed empowerment and vulnerability as issues of equal importance. Some of these theoretical debates are briefly reviewed here, after which the frameworks for analysis that they suggest are applied to the study of rural poverty in West Bengal. The two tasks that the paper then sets itself are to illustrate the empirical value of broader conceptualizations of poverty, and to highlight the methodological difficulties that they raise.