Fresh Perspectives

This publication brings together a collection of innovative papers which draw on the CEPA’s broad experience in monitoring, research and analysis of issues relevant to poverty in Sri Lanka. Fresh Perspectives offers the reader an alternative and sometimes challenging, view on new and old issues by using CEPA’s multidimensional approach to poverty and combining qualitative and quantitative analysis. The chapters in the first half of this volume consider a variety of different ways of measuring poverty, applying them to the Sri Lanka context. The analysis highlights the shortcomings of relying on the limited ‘conventional’, quantitative measures of poverty which often fail to illustrate the deeper and more complex picture of how poverty is experienced in Sri Lanka. This is complemented by the second half of the book which uses qualitative information and analysis to shed new light on poverty alleviation in four areas of relevance to Sri Lanka; conflict, the estate sector, youth, and the tsunami.

By presenting alternative views and the conventional thinking which has built up around these issues, giving the reader a new perspective.