Measuring And Evaluating Poverty Chapter 26 Test Bank

CHAPTER 26

Measuring and Evaluating Poverty

Multiple Choice Questions

1. When were the first comprehensive poverty studies undertaken in England?
   1. Early eighteenth century
   2. Late eighteenth century
   3. Early nineteenth century
   4. Late nineteenth century
   5. Early twentieth century
2. What impact did the rising standard of living have on the concept of poverty?
   1. A shift from absolute to relative poverty
   2. Moving the benchmark of poverty from $1-a-day to $3-a-day
   3. Shifting from quantitative to qualitative measurements of poverty
   4. Inclusion of the middle class as “poor”
   5. Moved poverty to the forefront of social issues.
3. Who received a Nobel Peace Prize for the idea of the “capability approach” to eradicating poverty?
   1. Peter Townsend
   2. Lester Pearson
   3. Amartya Sen
   4. Muhammad Yunus
   5. Steve Jobs
4. What is the most prominent approach to measuring poverty?
   1. Structural poverty
   2. Monetary poverty
   3. Relative poverty
   4. Moderate poverty
   5. Human poverty
5. How is the “welfare measure” most commonly assessed?
   1. By the poverty line
   2. By the means necessary to participate fully in society
   3. By the amount someone earns
   4. By the median wage
   5. By the amount one spends
6. What level of welfare constitutes poverty in a particular community?
   1. $1.50-a-day
   2. Marginal incomes in a given political community
   3. Standard deviation of income based on the Gini coefficient
   4. The threshold between poor and not poor
   5. Household incomes
7. How is an absolute poverty line established?
   1. Cost of a minimum consumption basket
   2. The marginal household income
   3. The caloric intake needed for survival
   4. The average household income
   5. The amount needed to participate in society
8. What is the World Bank’s International Extreme Poverty Line also known as?
   1. The “dollar a day” line
   2. The World Bank threshold
   3. The starvation line
   4. The relative poverty line
   5. The UNDP line
9. What percentage of median income is commonly used to assess relative poverty lines?
   1. 30 per cent
   2. 40 per cent
   3. 50 per cent
   4. 60 per cent
   5. 70 per cent
10. What is the poverty headcount index?
    1. Number of people below relative poverty line divided by national households
    2. An estimated number of people below the poverty line
    3. Number of people below the poverty line divided by the total population
    4. An estimated number of people receiving welfare benefits
    5. The absolute number of people living below the poverty line
11. What does the poverty gap index provide insight into?
    1. How deep poverty is
    2. Individual shortfalls from the poverty line
    3. How many people live in poverty
    4. How severe poverty is
    5. How big the gap is between the poor and non-poor
12. To whom does the poverty severity index give greater weight?
    1. Those who earn the bottom 2 per cent of income
    2. Those further away from the poverty line
    3. Those whose poverty is intersectional with other disadvantages
    4. Those who require state assistance to live day to day
    5. Those on the border of absolute and relative poverty
13. Which of the following is a substantial critique of the monetary approach to poverty?
    1. Everything needed for a minimum standard of living has a monetary value.
    2. Everything can be bought on markets.
    3. Specific income levels will be spent on basic needs.
    4. Household income is distributed so that individuals will meet their respective needs.
    5. All of the above
14. According to Streeten and Burki, what has been the result of aggregate economic growth?
    1. It has steadily lifted people out of poverty at the aggregate level.
    2. It has demonstrated reduced extreme poverty levels.
    3. It has done little for the bottom half of the developing world’s population.
    4. It has little correlation with poverty.
    5. It has generated sufficient resources to meaningfully tackle global poverty.
15. What is the utility of aggregate indices?
    1. They provide quick overviews of trends.
    2. They provide sectoral feedback.
    3. They easily display like-groups.
    4. They provide comparable data sets.
    5. They quickly display cross regional data.
16. Which of the following measurements do both the monetary and multi-dimensional approaches use?
    1. Welfare measure
    2. Poverty line
    3. Poverty measure
    4. All of the above
    5. None of the above
17. Which organization established the Human Development Index?
    1. UN Commission on Trade and Development
    2. UN Development Program
    3. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
    4. The World Bank
    5. The Development Assistance Countries
18. How is the Multidimensional Poverty Index different from the Human Development Index?
    1. It can be weighted for different measurements of poverty.
    2. It is rooted in Sen’s capability approach.
    3. It measures both poverty and inequality at the national level.
    4. It captures household data rather than national data.
    5. They are the same in function but different in form.
19. According to the Multidimensional Poverty Index, what percentage of the combined population in the 105 countries covered lived in poverty in 2018?
    1. 10 per cent
    2. 45 per cent
    3. 23 per cent
    4. 50 per cent
    5. 66 per cent
20. Which of the following tools is useful for identifying the overlap between the monetary and multidimensional approaches to poverty?
    1. Marginal poverty assessment
    2. Venn diagram
    3. Cross vector analysis
    4. The capability approach
    5. Raw data comparison
21. Why is Rwanda an interesting case in terms of measured and experienced poverty?
    1. Measured poverty is up but experienced poverty is down.
    2. There is a strong correlation between measured and experienced poverty.
    3. Inverse correlation between increased measured poverty and decreased experienced poverty.
    4. Measured poverty is down but experienced poverty is up.
    5. There is no significant connection between the two indicators.
22. Which country introduced the Gross National Happiness Index as a way to measure non-economic aspects of life?
    1. Colombia
    2. Nepal
    3. Bhutan
    4. South Africa
    5. Rwanda
23. After rejecting traditional economic measures of development, what tool has Bhutan adopted?
    1. Individual Deprivation Measurement
    2. Gross National Happiness
    3. Human Development Index
    4. Rural Poverty Index
    5. Perceived Poverty Index
24. What kind of data was used in Colombia’s MPI to create poverty policies at the municipal level?
    1. Individual Deprivation Measures
    2. Ethnographic data
    3. Local polling data
    4. Housing data
    5. Census data
25. What is the final step in measuring poverty?
    1. Fund local service providers
    2. Monitor progress
    3. Report on best practices
    4. Adopt poverty reduction measures
    5. Test results with another indicator
26. In comparison to the Millennium Goals, how do the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) differ in relation to poverty reduction?
    1. They acknowledge that poverty is about more than lack of income
    2. They acknowledge that poverty is constituted by deprivation in areas other than income
    3. They emphasize the need for poverty reduction for all
    4. They include space for national definitions and measure of poverty in addition to internationally comparable measures
    5. All of the above
27. Where has extreme poverty decreased most markedly over the past three decades?
    1. China and India
    2. Colombia
    3. Bhutan
    4. Pakistan and Uganda
    5. South Africa
28. What is the name of the index that was invented by The Economist in 1986 as a light-hearted version of the PPP principle?
    1. The “Cheeseburger Index”
    2. The “Whopper Index”
    3. The “Big Mac Index”
    4. The “Pizza Index”
    5. The “Hamburger Index”
29. Who advocated for “putting the last first” and pioneered participatory approaches that take account of people’s voices in development processes?
    1. Amartya Sen
    2. Robert Chambers
    3. Peter Townsend
    4. Benjamin Rowntree
    5. Streeten and Burki
30. How many people in the 28 countries of the European Union were living in poverty?
    1. 736 million
    2. 200.6 million
    3. 112.8 million
    4. 355 million
    5. 524.3 million

True or False Questions

Poverty has a specific definition that is universally accepted.

Rising living standards in the West shifted the focus from absolute to relative poverty.

Monetary approaches to poverty focus on monetary resources as an indicator of living standards.

Monetary poverty measurement is a direct approach to poverty measurement.

Amartya Sen developed the “capability approach.”

The monetary approach to poverty measurement requires assessing how much money someone has.

Assessing how much money someone has is easier in high-income countries than low-income countries.

It is easier to assess how much someone spends or consumes than earns.

Welfare is established at the individual level.

An absolute poverty line is usually based on average incomes.

The “dollar a day” measurement is also known as the International Poverty Line.

The “food poverty line” is based on the average caloric intake in a given community.

Purchasing power parity allows for comparative analysis between states.

The “poverty headcount index” is very accurate but rarely used.

Amartya Sen contrasts capabilities with freedom.

The Human Development Index measures health, education, and living standards.

Monetary and multidimensional measures of poverty are highly convergent.

Robert Chambers argues for putting the experiences of the poor at the centre of development.

Bhutan has adopted the Gross National Happiness index instead of more conventional measures.

Rwanda demonstrates the possible dissonance between poverty measures and experiences.

A Venn diagram can be used to demonstrate where the monetary poor and multidimensional poor overlap.

The absolute poverty line is now most widely used in European countries.

The absolute poverty line remains the most widely used method in low-income countries.

The proportion and numbers of people living in extreme monetary poverty across the globe has decreased considerably in the past three decades.

COVID-19 may have a negative severe impact on monetary poverty in the coming years.

Qualitative and participatory studies of poverty have become increasingly commonplace.

Poverty measurement is crucial for informing policy-making.

While multi-dimensional poverty approaches remain dominant, monetary measures are increasingly being adopted to inform policy formulation at the national level.

The “traffic light” reporting system triggers alerts when progress towards any poverty reduction target falls off track.

Poverty is in the “eye of the beholder”.

Short Answer Questions

1. What was the result of Benjamin Rowntree’s study on living conditions in York?
2. What is the difference between absolute and relative poverty?
3. What is monetary poverty?
4. Why is the monetary measure assessed on how much one consumes instead of how much one earns?
5. Should absolute or relative poverty be used in establishing the poverty line?
6. How are the international poverty lines established?
7. What is the “Big Mac Index”?
8. How has the absolute poverty line been critiqued?
9. What is the poverty gap index?
10. What motivated the rise of the measurement of multi-dimensional poverty?
11. What are the social exclusion methods?
12. What are the issues identified with the measurement of multi-dimensional poverty?
13. What is the Human Development Index?
14. What is the Multidimensional Poverty Index?
15. Why might policy makers need to go beyond simply comparing monetary and multidimensional indices of poverty?
16. What does “putting the last first” mean?
17. What is a poverty profile? Which monetary measures are used in its construction?
18. What is the Gross National Happiness index?
19. What have the global trends in extreme poverty looked like over the past thirty years?

1. What is the function of the purchasing power parity?
2. What is the capability approach and how is it different than the monetary approach?
3. What is the Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA)?
4. What are Participatory Poverty Assessments and how have they been used?

Essay Questions

1. Does the use of different approaches to measurement also lead to different pictures of poverty?
2. What do the debates surrounding how poverty can be measured tell us about crafting policies to address poverty?
3. Describe the three types of measures of the Foster-GreerThorbecke poverty measures.
4. Summarize the main criticisms to the monetary poverty approach.
5. Discuss how multi-dimensional poverty approaches are becoming official poverty measures for informing and guiding policy formulation at the national level.