Poverty is Lack of Capabilities: A Literature Review

This review explores poverty as a lack of capabilities based on existing literature. The capability approach rejects income-based measures of poverty and well-being, and also argues that human capabilities are the best measure of poverty. Scholars who define poverty and its causes have widely discussed and accepted this approach. The literature recognizes many capabilities, including education, employment, and health, are highly associated with poverty. Hence, this review primarily focuses on three key dimensions to explore poverty as a lack of capabilities. The review findings have identified that lack of capabilities such as being less educated, being ill health and being unemployed or poorly employed are highly associated with the individual being likelihood of poor. In addition, this paper contributes to the knowledge of exploring the relationship between poverty and capabilities.