Poverty in Scotland: methodology

Housing costs

There are a range measures of poverty, including absolute poverty and material deprivation – all to capture different dimensions of living standards.  The way in which housing costs are treated when measuring income has some important implications for poverty analysis and conclusions about the anti-poverty effects of policy reforms.  This is because the number of people counted as poor (e.g. with income falling below a threshold) depends crucially on the income concept adopted.  This publication presents relative and absolute poverty before and after housing costs, material deprivation before and after housing costs, and in-work poverty before and after housing costs.