The urban areas in Sri Lanka are defined as localities serviced by Municipal Councils and Urban Councils.¹ The Department of Census and Statistics (DCS) estimates that the share of the urban household population in Sri Lanka is more than 15 per cent² of the total population and is growing at around 3 per cent per year while Sri Lanka’s population is growing at around 1 per cent per year. The Sri Lankan government’s current development plan³ envisages an increase in the population living in urban areas and states the necessity to have sustainable urban development, minimise poverty in cities and...

The section details the progression of poverty measurement in Sri Lanka, to reveal concerns and issues in the methods used that have direct bearing on poverty estimates, especially in the urban sector. Following a brief note on the evolution of the concepts of poverty, we present the definitions and methods used to estimate poverty in Sri Lanka, looking especially at how the definition of poverty has changed over time, and the effects of this on poverty estimates and particularly urban poverty estimates. Content on the various definitions, measures and issues is largely drawn from the work of Satterthwaite (2004), Gunawardena...

This section presents some social and economic features of Sri Lanka’s urban sector overall, as a prelude to the discussion of urban poverty in Sri Lanka and focus on the Colombo administrative district. This is the most urbanised district of the country, containing over 86 per cent of Sri Lanka’s urban population (DCS 2001 a). The content of this section is drawn largely from the reports of the 2006/07 and 2009/10 HIES (DCS 2008a, 2011a, 2011b) and the CEPA study on under-served settlements in Colombo (Gunetilleke, Cader and Fernando 2004).

Sri Lanka’s urban sector is defined as the areas administered...

The previous sections demonstrate that consumption poverty lines are unable to capture poverty in a multi-dimensional context, and therefore are likely to under-estimate poverty levels. The main objective in the following analysis is to show that, in the urban sector, households categorised as non-poor, in relation to the official poverty line, may turn out to be poor in terms of unsatisfied basic needs in a multi-dimensional context. This section also examines the likely magnitude of the under-estimation of poverty.

We analyse household-level poverty using a set of basic needs indicators reflecting the multi-dimensional perspective of household poverty. We present a...

Conceptualisation and definition of poverty has direct implications on the measured magnitude of poverty. A variety of approaches and definitions have been used to measure poverty in Sri Lanka, but the basic approach has been measuring consumption poverty using an absolute poverty line defined in terms of cost of a minimum food-energy intake or cost of basic food and non-food needs. In the food-energy method, the poverty line is set at a point where consumption expenditure is just sufficient to meet a pre-determined food-energy requirement. In the cost-of-basic-needs method, the poverty line is set at a point where the expenditure...