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Monitoring and addressing global poverty: A new approach and implications for Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2023

Peter Saunders
Peter Saunders*
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales, Australia
*
Peter Saunders, Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia. Email: p.saunders@unsw.edu.au
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Abstract

Tony Atkinson’s death at the beginning of 2017 deprived economics of one of its leading contributors to research on public economics, inequality, poverty and the welfare state. This article focuses on his last official role, as Chair of the World Bank Commission on Global Poverty. The report of the Commission – already referred to as the Atkinson Commission – proposes a new approach to measuring and monitoring the global poverty reduction targets established as part of the Sustainable Development Goals agreed by the United Nations in 2015. Atkinson developed the framework and provided the academic impetus to the work of the Commission and wrote much of its report, assisted by comments provided by an Advisory Board of eminent experts in the field and a smaller working group of selected members. The article describes some of the main features of the report’s 21 recommendations, focusing on the measurement of poverty in both monetary and non-monetary dimensions and its attempt to draw together national and global efforts to measure and reduce poverty in all its forms. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of the new approach for Australia, which like many other developed countries has so far failed to engage actively with the debate over addressing extreme global poverty.

Keywords

D63I32Dollar a day poverty lineextreme povertymulti-dimensional povertyrelative poverty
Type
Articles
Information
The Economic and Labour Relations Review , Volume 29 , Issue 1: Symposium on inequality in honour of AB Atkinson , March 2018 , pp. 9 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2018

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