section_path: Measuring poverty/Relative poverty
section_name: Relative poverty
paragraph_text: Relative poverty
  
  Relative poverty views poverty as socially defined and dependent on social context. It is argued that the needs considered fundamental is not an objective measure and could change with the custom of society. For example, a person who cannot afford housing better than a small tent in an open field would be said to live in relative poverty if almost everyone else in that area lives in modern brick homes, but not if everyone else also lives in small tents in open fields (for example, in a nomadic tribe). Since richer nations would have lower levels of absolute poverty, relative poverty is considered the "most useful measure for ascertaining poverty rates in wealthy developed nations" and is the "most prominent and most-quoted of the EU social inclusion indicators".
  
  Usually, relative poverty is measured as the percentage of the population with income less than some fixed proportion of median income. This is a calculation of the percentage of people whose family household income falls below the Poverty Line. The main poverty line used in the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU) is based on "economic distance", a level of income set at 60% of the median household income. The United States federal government typically regulates this line to three times the cost of an adequate meal.
  
  There are several other different income inequality metrics, for example, the Gini coefficient or the Theil Index.