Targeting poverty: Lessons from monitoring Ireland's national anti-povertystrategy

In 1997 the Irish government adopted the National Anti-Poverty Strategy (NA PS), a global target for the reduction of poverty which illuminates a range of issues relating to official poverty targets. The Irish target is framed in terms of a relative poverty measure incorporating both relative income and direct measures of deprivation based on data on the extent of poverty f rom 1994. Since 1994 Ireland has experienced an unprecedented period of eco nomic growth that makes it particularly important to assess whether the tar get has been achieved, but in doing so we cannot avoid asking some underlyi ng questions about how poverty should be measured and monitored over time. After briefly outlining the nature of the NAPS measure, this article examin es trends in poverty in Ireland between 1987 and 1997, Results show that th e relative income and deprivation components of the NAPS measure reveal dif ferential trends with increasing relative income poverty, but decreasing de privation. However, this differential could be due to the fact that the dir ect measures of deprivation upon which NAPS is based have not been updated to take account of changes in real living standards and increasing expectat ions. To test whether this is so, we examine the extent to which expectatio ns about living standards and the structure of deprivation have changed ove r time using confirmatory factor analysis and tests of criterion validity u sing different definitions of deprivation. Results show that the combined i ncome and deprivation measure, as originally constituted, continues to iden tify a set of households experiencing generalised deprivation resulting fro m a lack of resources.