Basic needs

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Basic needs poverty rate for measuring poverty in Canada, calculated by Professor Chris Sarlo, an economist at Nipissing University in North Bay, Canada and a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute by using Statistics Canada's socio-economic databases including the Survey of Household Spending to determine the cost of a list of household necessities (food, shelter, clothing, health care, personal care, essential furnishings, transportation and communication, laundry, home insurance, and miscellaneous) for various communities across Canada and then, based on family size, determines how many households have insufficient income to afford those necessities.
Basic needs poverty rate for measuring poverty in Canada, calculated by Professor Chris Sarlo, an economist at Nipissing University in North Bay, Canada and a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute by using Statistics Canada's socio-economic databases including the Survey of Household Spending to determine the cost of a list of household necessities (food, shelter, clothing, health care, personal care, essential furnishings, transportation and communication, laundry, home insurance, and miscellaneous) for various communities across Canada and then, based on family size, determines how many households have insufficient income to afford those necessities.

The basic needs approach in development discourse focuses on the measurement of poverty with a view to its elimination in the shortest amount of time. As one of the major approaches to the measurement of poverty, this approach attempts to define the absolute minimum necessary for long term physical well-being, usually in terms of consumption goods; the poverty line is then defined as the amount of income required to satisfy those needs. Related approaches, taking their cue from the work of Amartya Sen, focus on 'capabilities' rather than consumption. As a result, it is typically the case that emphasis is placed only on the minimum level of consumption of 'basic needs' such as food, water, shelter, sanitation, healthcare, and education, although the basic needs approach used by Sarlo, for Canada, has an expanded list of necessities, as listed in the accompanying chart. Development programs following the basic needs approach do not invest in economically productive activities that will help a society carry its own weight in the future, rather it focuses on allowing the society to consume just enough to rise above the poverty line and meet its basic needs. These programs focus more on subsistence than fairness. Nevertheless, in terms of "measurement", the basic needs or absolute approach does appear to be of great interest. The 1995 world summit on social development in Copenhagen had, as one of its principal declarations that all nations of the world should develop measures of both absolute and relative poverty and should gear national policies to "eradicate absolute poverty by a target date specified by each country in its national context."

A traditional list of immediate "basic needs" is food (including water), shelter, and clothing.[1]

Interestingly, the Municipality of Rosario, Batangas, Philippines implemented its Aksyon ng Bayan Rosario 2001 And Beyond Human and Ecological Security Plan using this concept as a core strategy through the Minimum Basic Needs Approach to Improved Quality of Life - Community-Based Information System (MBN-CBIS) prescribed by the Philippine Government. This approach helped the municipal government identify priority families and communities for intervention, as well as rationalize the allocation of its social development funds.

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  1. ^ Denton, John A. (1990). Society and the official world: a reintroduction to sociology. Dix Hills, N.Y: General Hall, 17. ISBN 0-930390-94-6. 
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