Well-Being in Latin America by Mariano Rojas

Author:Mariano Rojas
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030334987
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Keywords

Latin AmericaWell-beingPovertyDomains of lifeWell-being deprivation

Poverty is a very old concept and its conception changes over time and across regions. In general terms, the concept makes reference to a situation where well-being is low or lacking at all; hence, poverty is a concept which is highly dependent on the well-being one.

During the past decades the concept of poverty acquired greater relevance as an indicator to assess social performance and policy success. The Millennium Development Goals and, more recently, the Sustainable Development Goals made of poverty reduction a central aim of international organizations and governments. In fact, governments and international organizations need to assess their success on the basis of the achievement of some goals which are considered valuable, and economic growth and the abatement of poverty have become the most frequently used standards. The failure or success of administrations is usually assessed on the rates of growth and on the reduction of poverty during the administration’s period. It is common for the poverty-abatement objective to go hand in hand with the economic growth one; as a matter of fact, both goals are closely associated because they are conceptually based on the same postulate: the high importance that is attributed to income as a well-being driver. Hence it is not surprising at all that during the past decades poverty has been mostly understood as lack of income or as low income; some variations—such as multidimensional poverty—have being introduced, but they are still highly dependent on income.

The setting of specific poverty-reduction goals by the Development Goals’ initiatives made it necessary to define specific and universal measures on the basis of available information in order to keep track of the evolution of poverty rates and to declare the success or failure of the initiatives. Therefore, it became customary to conceptualize poverty on the basis of its measurement rather than to measure it on the basis of its conceptualization; for many policy-makers, politicians, economists and students poverty was associated to having a household per capita income per day beneath a given and externally-defined income threshold. Similarly, success in the abatement of poverty basically means that household income jumps over the income-poverty line.

This chapter studies how the income-based understanding of poverty relates with people’s well-being. It was shown in Chap. 5 that the relationship between income and people’s experience of being well is not straightforward; hence, it should not come as a surprise that an income-based conception of poverty is very limited to approximate well-being deprivation.

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