The Price Of Survival.(World Affairs)(new poverty line in Asia reveals more remain poor)

Byline: George Wehrfritz

Two efforts to redraw the poverty line in Asia find that millions more are barely getting by.

It's hard to imagine a balance sheet where the accounting matters more. In Asia, despite an ongoing boom, hundreds of millions of people still subsist on such meager incomes that any shift in the official poverty line can make conditions suddenly look brighter or bleaker--at least on paper. That point was made dramatically last week when two leading development banks revised their definitions of what it means to be poor. Though the studies differed methodologically, both significantly increased the number of Asians estimated to be living without adequate nutrition, clothing and shelter, a change that could complicate U.N.-led efforts to halve the global poverty rate by 2015.

The revised poverty lines don't reflect a sudden drop in conditions. Instead, they represent an attempt by development economists to, as Robert Zeigler of the International Rice Research Institute in Manila puts it, get their "arms around the definition of poverty and articulate it in a way that [policymakers] can use effectively." To accomplish that, the Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB) proposed scrapping the $1-per-day poverty measure popularized by the World Bank in 1990 as an estimate of the per-person cost of procuring the 2,100 calories a day deemed necessary for human health. The ADB's new Asian Poverty Line raises the bar to $1.35 per day. And the World Bank study raises its global poverty line to $1.25.

Though both poverty lines are based on purchasing-power parity (the comparative cost of similar goods in different countries), their methodologies and focuses diverge. The World Bank extrapolated poverty levels from general consumption patterns in 15 poor countries around the world, only two of which were Asian, whereas the ADB surveyed poor households in 16 Asian countries, arguing that this better identified specific purchasing patterns. For example, the study found that struggling households typically procure inferior grades of rice in small quantities (a kilo or less at a time) from local traders, whereas average Asians increasingly buy their grain in the 10-kg. sacks from supermarkets (as a result, the poor often pay less per calorie). The result of the ADB approach is a poverty line tailored specifically to Asia, where the bulk of the world's poor still live.

Both new standards suggest the number of Asians barely surviving is far ...