The departmental online lecture was successfully held on May 24, 2023. Prof. Peter Gordon Saunders (Emeritus Professor, The University of New South Wales) was invited to share on "A Community-Based Poverty Measure: Revisiting the Consensual Income Approach with Application to Australia and Hong Kong".
One criticism of conventional (income-based) poverty measures is that they fail to capture the lived experience of poverty or reflect community views on how much income is needed to make ends meet (and thus avoid poverty). The Consensual Income Approach seeks to address these limitations by deriving a poverty line that builds on perceptions of what ‘making ends meet’ means in practice, as contained in responses to social surveys that ask this question directly of people. The approach attracted considerable attention in the 2000s and earlier, and surveys have been conducted in several countries that allow its implications and validity to be tested. This lecture reviewed how the approach aligns with recent developments in poverty research and explained methods used to estimate a poverty line and poverty rates. Recent survey data for Australia and Hong Kong was used to apply the methodology; the results were presented and analyzed, and the implications for future applications were discussed.
Students and teachers from our department and well-known overseas professors actively participated in this lecture, and the topic aroused a lively discussion. They all had a better understanding of the difference in the consensual income approach and conventional relative income approach and its application in Australia and Hong Kong.
An online group photo of participants