A/HRC/7/15 page 7 24. The first dimension is income poverty. A simple definition of absolute income poverty could be based on a minimum daily amount of calorie intake from food necessary for survival in a reasonably healthy condition, supplemented by some minimum amount of non-food items regarded as essential for a decent social existence. It would then be possible to determine a minimum expenditure line; people who live below it would be considered extremely poor. Alternatively, income poverty could be equated, by convention, with a per capita level of expenditure or poverty line, such as $1 or $2 per day, in terms of a comparable level of purchasing power.2 25. A relative interpretation of income poverty would consider the sociocultural context of a country, while defining capacity to fulfil basic needs. While a person’s income covers the requirements of subsistence and essential consumption, he or she may be regarded as poor if his or her income does not allow access to goods and services required to satisfy sociocultural norms. A group of people may then be regarded as poor in one country even if they would be considered not poor or relatively rich in another country. Relative poverty can also be defined directly in terms of income distribution. For example, people belonging to the lowest 10 per cent in the scale of income distribution can be regarded, by social consensus, as relatively poor. 26. The second component is human development poverty, where extreme poverty is regarded as extreme or severe deprivation. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its human development reports formulated certain indicators on health, education, food, nutrition and other basic needs (in addition to per capita income) as Human Development Indicators or components of the concept of well-being. In this context, the concept implies a person’s ability to lead a life that she or he values with freedom of “being and doing”. Extreme poverty, in that sense, can be regarded as extreme deprivation of such freedoms, which can be captured through the indicators. For example, literacy rates or school enrolment ratios represent freedom from ignorance and the lack of education. Similarly, indices of life expectancy or infant mortality have been described as indicators of the freedom to lead a healthy life. 27. Such freedoms include both the processes and outcomes of social arrangements in both their constitutive and instrumental roles. For example, the freedom to lead a healthy life is a constitutive element of a person’s well-being; however, it is also instrumental in allowing the person to enjoy other freedoms, including freedom to work or freedom of movement. Income can be recognized in both its constitutive and instrumental roles, though in most cases, instrumentality is much more important than its intrinsic value. Income may also be seen as a 2 This method of measuring income poverty is known as “headcount ratio”, which is the proportion of people below the poverty line and is a simpler measure for which now data have been collected for most developing countries. But this is not necessarily the best measure of income poverty, because it does not capture the average shortfall of income of the poor from the poverty line nor the distribution of income among the poor. Both these notions may be necessary in order to devise a policy to solve the problems of the poorest in any anti-poor programme. Where data are available, these other indicators may be used in addition to the headcount ratio to attack income poverty appropriately. However, we have chosen the usual headcount ratio as an indicator of income poverty, as a first approximation of this exercise. See Sen (1995), “Inequality Re-examined”, Oxford, pp. 102-116.