Poverty Definition Essay

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What is poverty? One of my favorite definitions of poverty is ‘the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions”(Merriam,2011),but if I could define poverty myself I think poverty is also the lack of resources to fulfill a person’s basic needs such as food,clean water,warmth and shelter.Poverty is categorized into three basic types which includes absolute poverty,relative poverty and social exclusion.In this case,the first definition refers more to relative poverty and that is being poor in relation to the others living in the same society, therefore if you’re considered poor in the UK,you might not be considered poor in Venezuela because the standards of poverty or poverty line differentiates …show more content…

There are several reasons why a lot of countries still suffer from poverty today.One being geographical factors such as climate,landscape and natural resources.For instance,a country like Cyprus which is really dependent on tourism,needs landscape in order to attract tourists and maintain a consistent income for the country otherwise their country will slowly decline.This also explains why most African countries are poor,the climate is extremely dry so many countries are suffering from drought which leads to unfertile land so most food and crops cannot be planted as well as not enough drinking water and source of clean water for everyone.The stages of economy of every country starts from the primary sector which includes extracting natural resources but in this case this cannot be done since deserts occupies most part of Africa causing most poor countries to be trapped in a poverty trap and it makes it harder for them to escape poverty.Therefore,these poor countries cannot develop further and remains poor.Secondly,political factors are also very important as corruption is very common within poor countries.Corruption is caused by poor management and this leads to more social inequality and uneven distribution of wealth meaning the rich is very rich and poor is very poor so if you calculate the average(GDP Per Capita)the country will still be fairly poor.For example,Scandinavian countries and Japan has the most well evenly distributed wealth because the welfare state within