Sweden

A presentation on poverty measurement in Sweden was made by Björn Halleröd, University of Gothenburg, at the Second Peter Townsend Memorial Conference, Measuring Poverty: The State of the Art, in 2011.

In 1992, Halleröd undertook a study looking at which aspects of Swedish standards of living were seen as necessities and those who could not afford these items. The table below gives a summary of the findings (final sample size 793 persons). 

Source: Björn Halleröd (1994) A New Approach to the Direct Consensual Measurement of Poverty.

From this data set, Halleröd developed the Proportional Deprivation Index (PDI). In the consensual method as developed by Mack and Lansley (see ‘How poor is too poor? Defining poverty’), only items which more than 50 per cent of the population identified as necessities are used as deprivation indicators, what Halleröd calls a Majority Needs Index (MNI). In the PDI all items from the preliminary list are included, but each item is given a weight that is the proportion of the population identifying it as a necessity. Halleröd compared the results using an MNI with those using a PDI index and found a high level of consistency between the two approaches, both between the two measures and between the measures and other indicators of material hardship and income.

See also:
Halleröd, B. (1994) A New Approach to the Direct Consensual Measurement of Poverty, Social Policy Research Centre Discussion Paper No. 50.
Comparisons between Sweden, Britain and Bangladesh can be found in ‘Consensual poverty in Britain, Sweden and Bangladesh: a comparative study’, a paper by A.I. Mahbub Uddin Ahmed, Professor of Sociology at the University of Dhaka.