What is poverty?

poverty (n) (Yahoo Education): 

1. The state of being poor; lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts.
2. Deficiency in amount; scantiness: "the poverty of feeling that reduced her soul" (Scott Turow).
3. Unproductiveness; infertility: the poverty of the soil.
4. Renunciation made by a member of a religious order of the right to own proper

relative poverty (from Biz/ed) : "the level of poverty in a country expressed in term of certain level of income such as half of the average wage" versus absolute poverty : " level of poverty when only the minimum levels of food, clothing and shelter can be met", for example, percentage of people living on less than $1 a day.

In Luxembourg, one is relative poor if they make less than half of the GDP per capita ($78,395 / 2 = <$39,197.50) ($PPP, from IMF 2009).  Clearly, this is a much higher number than a country like Tunisia ($8,254 / 2 = <$4,128) ($PPP, from IMF 2009).  However, we can compare across countries absolute poverty because we can simply calculate the percentage of the population living below $1 PPP per day.  The following map from Wikipedia shows us these figures graphically.  Unsurprisingly, the map shows a similar pattern to countries with the most un/underdevelopment and corruption.

Videos one, two and three all provide visualizations and stories of poverty.  Watch them.  The entire blog is also informative. 

A poverty trap occurs when countries cannot lift themselves out of poverty because of the twisted nature of barriers to growth and development.  We can illustrate this using a poverty cycle like the one shown in Blink & Dorton (2007):