Abstract

The poverty penalty is the price that the poor pay more than the rich to obtain the same or similar goods To be consistent with the way this concept is presented in the author who originally deals with it Caplovitz and in the author who originally calls it Prahalad the understanding of means similar concerns a quality standard imposed on the consumer as a condition of its functioning in society The sociological relationships that determine this pattern shape through the institutions participating in the market the economic ecosystem so called by Prahalad In view of this the fight against that penalty is of questionable success in the absence of interventions to treat the sociological bases from which it is generated which in turn implies that the measurements that lend themselves to identifying the penalty of poverty need to include the effects of those sociological determinants in the absence of which they are useful as an exploratory data analysis which only suggests the existence of the poverty penalty but does not actually verify it In order to be consistent with the pioneering authors in the treatment of the penalization of poverty the concept needs to be understood in the context of markets or market-based In this sense related concepts are presented in the literature such as catastrophic expenses out-of-pocket expenses uncompensated expenses consumer detriment and double jeopardy Taken together as market-based these concepts point to two different ways of interpreting the penalization of poverty