According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Poverty is said to exist when people lack the means to satisfy their basic needs." Using this definition, one must find out what these basic needs of humans are. The narrowest determination of these needs would only put the starving, and people dying from exposure at the poverty line because their basic needs keep them alive, and since they lack these needs, they are in poverty. However, a broader definition of these needs is "those [needs] reflecting the prevailing standards of living in the community." This definition measures the people deemed to be impoverished against other people in the population as a whole. A problem, besides the definition of needs, which comes up in defining poverty is that of the non-economic factors that have been associated with poverty. Among these are: "poor health, low le

This information has answered the three questions proposed. As shown by the definition, most of the world deems poverty to be relative poverty. Relative poverty is the revised definition. I also explored how people come to be in a situation of poverty, and I discovered that there is always a variety of reasons, and some people cannot help being in the situation. Finally, I discovered what has been done in the past to fight poverty. I now can see exactly how poverty is an ongoing problem that needs constant attention.

However forward-looking these statistics may seem, the poverty rates, however low they may be since the 1980s, are still higher than they were in the 1970s. Also, the poverty rate for children was also higher than other industrialised countries in Europe. According to Greenstein, the poverty rates in the United States are still too high for a country with an economy as strong as its own. In families headed by a single mother, in 1998, the poverty rate for children was at 55 percent. In African American families in this situation, the poverty rate was 60 percent, and in Hispanic families, 67 percent.

Poverty has also been separated into different types temporally and based on distribution. The types based on time are short-term, long-term and cyclical. Based on distribution, the types are widespread, concentrated and individual. Short-term poverty is caused mainly by loss of job, major injury, or bad investments. Short-term poverty can become long-term if the person who has become impoverished does nothing, or is unsuccessful in attempts, to remedy the situation. Long-term poverty is often the result of disability, being born into a destitute situation, or one's culture. Cyclical poverty usually affects a community as a whole. This type of poverty is usually attributed to the business cycle. In times of recession and depression, poverty runs rampant. However, cyclical poverty tends to be a shorter-term type because once the cycle moves on towards inflation, then the number of impoverished people shrinks.

In the 1990s, t

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