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The political foundations of poverty are all too often ignored by poverty analysts. This paper presents, from a political-economy perspective, a critique of mainstream poverty analysis, drawing on examples from India and Vietnam

The author argues that the way mainstream research considers poverty separates it from the social processes of the accumulation and distribution of wealth. This serves to depoliticise poverty, as it becomes a kind of a social abnormality, rather than the reality of modern state and market society functions.

Difficulties with the mainstream approach to poverty research are that it typically:

• focuses excessively on those factors that can be most easily measured
• confuses causes and effects, so that the characteristics of individuals, or of households, that are associated with poverty are represented as causal
• provides no analysis of the structures and relationships that give rise to the effects which define poverty.

The author suggests that there is a need in poverty research for:

• shifting from explanation of individual deprivation to explanation of inequalities in the distribution of power, wealth and opportunity
• recognising that studying poverty is not to be equated with 'studying the poor'
• getting away from the research industry model
• challenging the privilege attached to hypothesis-testing models of enquiry
• recognising the flawed logic in the idea that value-free social science can find scientific 'cures' for social problems.

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