In 2014/15, the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey used a new set of questions to examine deprivation poverty. It found 10.7% of the population was in deprivation poverty defined as those who lacked two or more necessities because they couldn't afford them.
People in Mexcio have a relative and a wide view of what should constitute a minimum standard of living, covering essential services such as a pension, nursery care and housing credit as well as durables such as a fridge and computer. Read more.
Research into attitudes to necessities in Japan suggests that the Japanese public tends to have a more restrictive notion of what a minimum standard of living should encompass than in the UK. Nevertheless, there was also evidence of a consensus on the majority of adult items in terms of whether they constituted necessities or not. Read more.
PSEHK reports that 21% of people in Hong Kong are living in poverty having a low income and a low standard of living and more than 27% of children. Accommodation is a particular problem with more than 50% reporting problems. Read more about the full results of this detailed survey of living standards in Hong Kong.
A presentation on poverty measurement in West Africa looking at the survey of living conditions in Mauritania was made by Madior Fall, AFRISTAT, at the Second Peter Townsend Memorial Conference, Measuring Poverty: The State of the Art, in 2011.
A presentation on poverty measurement in Sweden was made by Björn Halleröd, University of Gothenburg, at the Second Peter Townsend Memorial Conference, Measuring Poverty: The State of the Art, in 2011.
In 1992, Halleröd undertook a study looking at which aspects of Swedish standards of living were seen as necessities and those who could not afford these items. The table below gives a summary of the findings (final sample size 793 persons).
A presentation on poverty measurement in Finland was made by Veli-Matti Ritakallio, University of Turku, at the Second Peter Townsend Memorial Conference, Measuring Poverty: The State of the Art, in 2011.
The consensual approach to measuring poverty is now widely used in poverty research internationally – adapting and improving the method in the process. This section reports international research that uses relative deprivation to examine poverty and, in particular, the consensual method as developed in the Poverty and Social Exclusion surveys or developments from that method. Under European Union, read about the new 13-item index of material deprivation adopted by the EU in 2017. In a CROP briefing on 'The consensual approach to child poverty measurement' Shailen Nandy and Gill Main argue that this approach provides an important alternative the the narrow, minimalist definitions of poverty dominating conventional international measures.
The deprivation questions in the Family Resources Survey are asked annually and provide a way to track progress since 2004/05. Below you can see the changes in Northern Ireland during that period. The graph shows the proportion of persons living in households with incomes below 60 per cent of UK median income (before housing costs are deducted) who lack each of the items because they cannot afford it.
The Family Resources Survey (FRS) is a large-scale annual survey of the incomes and circumstances of private households in the United Kingdom. Sponsored by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), it collects detailed information on income and benefits, savings and investments, occupation and employment, pension participation, disability, housing tenure and carers. Since 2004/05, it has included a module on material deprivation that has been derived from the concept of consensual necessities to inform the choice of indicators and, in particular, the work of the PSE 1999 study.