The economy and poverty

Recent years have witnessed a growing discussion around the inadequacy of dominant conceptions of economic progress and highlighted how widely used metrics fail to capture things that make a difference to people’s lives. In this chapter, the “Beyond GDP” agenda is taken as a starting point and the literature on subjective well-being, capabilities, and relational equality is explored to show how these views, respectively, approach questions around what the role of the economy and of economic progress is, connecting these approaches with their descriptive and normative understanding of poverty. It discusses how this questioning of long-held conceptions of economic progress bears on concerns about specific aspects of the economy which are especially significant for poverty reduction strategies – focusing on growth and work in particular. The chapter shows how these concerns can rest on rather different normative grounds and how these reflect different policy priorities and possible solutions.