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A Reader Response To The Basic Needs Budget
A Reader Response To The Basic Needs Budget
Maine Policy Review
This commentary presents a thoughtful, personal illustration of the basic needs budget approach in response to an article by Stephanie Seguino published in Maine Policy Review in October 1995. The basic needs budget approach originally was designed to more accurately measure household economic status than the official poverty measure. The intent is to provide a series of budgets that describe the amount of income required by “self-sufficient” households to meet basic needs. As this reader’s analysis so aptly demonstrates, more generalized use of a basic needs budget approach would in fact require the development of a series of baseline budgets …
Back To Basics: Measuring Economic Performance Using A Basic Needs Budget Approach, Stephanie Seguino
Back To Basics: Measuring Economic Performance Using A Basic Needs Budget Approach, Stephanie Seguino
Maine Policy Review
Current measures of poverty have come under increasing scrutiny by policymakers and practitioners. Changes in family structure, labor force participation by women, and societal obligations such as child and eldercare call for more complex measurements of family need. Economist Stephanie Seguino focuses attention on the “basic needs budget,” a new approach to measuring poverty and family need. She proposes a set of criteria for developing a basic needs budget and suggests that the basic needs approach promises to provide a more accurate assessment of how our economic system is performing its basic task—that of ensuring an adequate production of resources …