The measurement of poverty and inequality is surprisingly intricate. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a self-contained overview of the issues that arise when trying to measure poverty. The virtue of this chapter is concision; for more extensive treatments, one might start with the Handbook by Haughton and Khandker ( 2009), or the classic exposition by Ravallion (1992). A more formal treatment may be found in Duclos and Araar (2006), and a sophisticated treatment of issues related to the measurement of multidimensional poverty in Kakwani and Silber (2008).