How Not to Count the Poor

Abstract

What has been happening to the living standards of poor people in the world lies at the heart of the globalization debate. Indeed, as Amartya Sen has recently argued, the real concern of the so-called "anti-globalization" protestors is surely not globalization per se, for these protests are amongst the most globalized events in the modern world; rather, their concerns seem to stem in large part from the continuing deprivations and rising disparities in levels of living that they see in the current period of globalization (Sen, 2002).