Il primo degli Obiettivi di sviluppo fissato dalle Nazioni Unite per il nuovo millennio si propone di dimezzare, entro il 2015, il numero di persone che nel mondo hanno un reddito inferiore a un dollaro al giorno e la quota di esseri umani che quotidianamente soffrono la fame. Nel dibattito economico e politico ha assunto grande rilevanza il tema dell'identificazione dei poveri e della misurazione della povertà ed è stato elaborato il concetto centrale di povertà multidimensionale: la deprivazione viene ormai riferita a una molteplicità di dimensioni della vita importanti per la realizzazione individuale. Secondo questa impostazione l'obiettivo si connette con altri quali l'eliminazione delle diseguaglianze di genere e il sostegno all'istruzione primaria. Ecco dunque che rispondere all'interrogativo posto dal libro consente di declinare le forme di povertà in diversi spazi di valutazione (dalle risorse alle libertà) e di apprezzare al meglio come la diversità umana imponga politiche differenziate di fuoriuscita dalla povertà.

Poverty, of what?

Resources, Opportunities and Capabilities

The relationship between resources, opportunities and poverty lies at the heart of welfare economics. Economists usually work with the very crude definition of per-capita income as indicative of human welfare and then assess poverty in the space of income. Nevertheless, as Amartya Sen has suggested, the aptness of income as a measure of human development is debatable and poverty can be defined and analyzed with respect to different reference spaces. Consistently, this volume draws together many of the most important contemporary theories focused on the definition of poverty and its measurement. Philosophers and social scientists have approached the contro- versial problem at stake from a variety of points of view. Thus, some chapters study the resources-oriented approach to the measurement of poverty, as formalized by the neoclassical economics; others, the opportunities-oriented approach strongly defended by many scholars. Following the latters, we discuss the notion of human well-being and we suggest how to measure well-being poverty. Furthermore, special attention is devoted to the Capability Approach, inspired to the works of Sen and Nussbaum, as a theory in which poverty can be decomposed in two types of deprivation: i) shortage in well-being achievements; ii) lack of adequate well-being freedoms. Exactly Sen’s concepts of functioning and capability suit well here. Therefore, a chapter analyzes the foundations of the Capability Approach, and some of its recent advancements, while another one sketches how poverty can be quan- tified in this framework. Finally, a chapter introduces to the human development paradigm developed in the works of the United Nations Development Programme. Such a paradigm is of some help when ideas and concepts of the Capability Approach are applied to developmental problems. With this respect, virtues and drawbacks of the Human Development Index are unfolded and some recent refinements of this measure compared. In a famous lecture, Amartya Sen reminds us that, in the discussions on economic equality, and its attainment, it is preliminary important to specify the Equality of what?. In this book, we argue that, if we want to take seriously the Millenium Development Goals, a detailed account of causes and types of poverty is crucial as well.