Poverty and Belonging: Three ways to identify the poor and what each reveal about belonging

Does poverty identify people with weaker institutional and social ties? This article examines how the answer changes across three definitions of poverty: living in one of the poorest economies, belonging to the lowest income quintile within one’s own country, and falling below a common global purchasing-power threshold. It compares five dimensions of belonging: institutional access, perceived government care, perceived neighbor care, support from family or friends in times of difficulty, and reported discrimination. Only Ethiopia in the original 55-country study falls within the poorest fifth of economies ranked by GDP per capita. Within countries, a more consistent pattern emerges. Reported discrimination averages 28.86% in the lowest national income quintile and 23.80% in the other four. The gap is positive in 46 of 53 countries. Lower-income respondents also perceive less government and neighbor care. The global analysis pools 1,850 national deciles from 185 economies. The bottom fifth of the reconstructed population comprises 1.596 billion people from 105 economies. In the expanded comparison, 60.66% of this group perceive government care, against 71.03% of the upper four fifths. Reported discrimination is also higher, at 26.75% versus 23.44%, although the direction of this difference depends on how responses are distributed within survey quintiles split by the global threshold. Institutional access and family support describe the national environments in which the two groups live. The data and code supporting this article are available in the accompanying Poverty and Belonging: Data and Replication Package Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24041492. The original 55-country database is available in the replication package for The Economics of Belonging: Measuring Economic and Social Achievement across Nations (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23603825).