To illustrate: poverty can be viewed in absolute terms, i.e., in such a way that the poverty line is determined in terms of the level of real income considered the minimum required to buy a certain basket of goods, such as food, clothing and housing.
If we define the poverty line of 1997 as the level of income defining poverty in absolute terms, we would get the result that the rate of poverty, using this definition, hardly changed from 1997 to 2004, and actually went down a little. It declined until 2001, and rose somewhat thereafter.