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Understandings and Misunderstandings of Multidimensional Poverty Measurement

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors elucidate the strengths, limitations, and misunderstandings of multidimensional poverty measurement and provide an intuitive description of their measurement approach, including a "dual cutoff" identification step that views poverty as the state of being multiply deprived, and an aggregation step based on the traditional Foster Greer and Thorbecke (FGT) measures.
Abstract: Multidimensional measures provide an alternative lens through which poverty may be viewed and understood. In recent work we have attempted to offer a practical approach to identifying the poor and measuring aggregate poverty (Alkire and Foster 2011). As this is quite a departure from traditional unidimensional and multidimensional poverty measurement – particularly with respect to the identification step – further elaboration may be warranted. In this paper we elucidate the strengths, limitations, and misunderstandings of multidimensional poverty measurement in order to clarify the debate and catalyse further research. We begin with general definitions of unidimensional and multidimensional methodologies for measuring poverty. We provide an intuitive description of our measurement approach, including a ‘dual cutoff’ identification step that views poverty as the state of being multiply deprived, and an aggregation step based on the traditional Foster Greer and Thorbecke (FGT) measures. We briefly discuss five characteristics of our methodology that are easily overlooked or mistaken and conclude with some brief remarks on the way forward.
Citations
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TL;DR: The report, published by the Earth Institute and co-edited by the institute's director, Jeffrey Sachs, reflects a new worldwide demand for more attention to happiness and absence of misery as criteria for government policy.
Abstract: The report, published by the Earth Institute and co-edited by the institute’s director, Jeffrey Sachs, reflects a new worldwide demand for more attention to happiness and absence of misery as criteria for government policy. It reviews the state of happiness in the world today and shows how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness.

911 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) as discussed by the authors is a new survey-based index designed to measure the empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agricultural sector.
Abstract: The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is a new survey-based index designed to measure the empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agricultural sector. The WEAI was initially developed as a tool to reflect women’s empowerment that may result from the United States government’s Feed the Future Initiative, which commissioned the development of the WEAI. The WEAI can also be used more generally to assess the state of empowerment and gender parity in agriculture, to identify key areas in which empowerment needs to be strengthened, and to track progress over time. The WEAI is an aggregate index, reported at the country or regional level, based on individual-level data collected by interviewing men and women within the same households. The WEAI comprises two subindexes. The first assesses the degree to which women are empowered in five domains of empowerment (5DE) in agriculture. It reflects the percentage of women who are empowered and, among those who are not, the percentage of domains in which women enjoy adequate achievements. These domains are (1) decisions about agricultural production, (2) access to and decisionmaking power about productive resources, (3) control of use of income, (4) leadership in the community, and (5) time allocation. The second subindex (the Gender Parity Index [GPI]) measures gender parity. The GPI reflects the percentage of women who are empowered or whose achievements are at least as high as the men in their households. For those households that have not achieved gender parity, the GPI shows the empowerment gap that needs to be closed for women to reach the same level of empowerment as men. This technical paper documents the development of the WEAI and presents pilot data from Bangladesh, Guatemala, and Uganda, so that researchers and practitioners seeking to use the index in their own work would understand how the survey questionnaires were developed and piloted, how the qualitative case studies were undertaken, how the index was constructed, how various indicators were validated, and how it can be used in other settings.

705 citations


Cites background or methods from "Understandings and Misunderstanding..."

  • ...In this section, we use the second notation, as it is consistent with the M0 measurement (Alkire & Foster, 2011a,b)....

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  • ...We refer to this important step as censoring the inadequacies of the empowered (see Alkire & Foster, 2011a,b; Alkire, Foster, & Santos, 2011)....

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  • ...Based on the Alkire–Foster methodology (Alkire & Foster, 2011 a,b; Alkire & Santos 2010), WEAI is an aggregate index that can be broken down in many ways....

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  • ...In the WEAI, we define the disempowerment cutoff as strict (ci > k); in previous work we have defined the cutoff as weak (ci P k) (Alkire & Foster, 2011a,b)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) as discussed by the authors is a measure of acute poverty, defined as a person's inability to meet simultaneously minimum international standards in indicators related to the Millennium Development Goals and to core functionings.
Abstract: This paper presents the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), a measure of acute poverty, understood as a person’s inability to meet simultaneously minimum international standards in indicators related to the Millennium Development Goals and to core functionings It constitutes the first implementation of the direct method to measure poverty for over 100 developing countries After presenting the MPI, we analyse its scope and robustness, with a focus on the data challenges and methodological issues involved in constructing and estimating it A range of robustness tests indicate that the MPI offers a reliable framework that can complement global income poverty estimates

585 citations

Book
10 Mar 2016
TL;DR: The first part of a two-part volume on poverty in Africa as mentioned in this paper examines progress over the past two decades along both monetary and non-monetary dimensions of poverty, assessing progress in education and health, the extent to which people are free from violence, and the joint occurrence of various types of deprivation.
Abstract: This report is the first of a two-part volume on poverty in Africa. This study documents the data challenges and revisits the core broad facts about poverty in Africa; the second report will explore ways to accelerate its reduction. The report takes a broad, multidimensional view of poverty, assessing progress over the past two decades along both monetary and nonmonetary dimensions. The dearth of comparable, good-quality household consumption surveys makes assessing monetary poverty especially challenging. The report scrutinizes the data used to assess monetary poverty in the region and explores how adjustments for data issues affect poverty trends. At the same time, the remarkable expansion of standardized household surveys on nonmonetary dimensions of well-being, including opinions and perceptions, opens up new opportunities. The report examines progress in education and health, the extent to which people are free from violence and able to shape their lives, and the joint occurrence of various types of deprivation. It also reviews the distributional aspects of poverty,by studying various dimensions of inequality. To shed light on Africa’s diversity, the report examines differences in performance across countries, by location, and by gender. Countries are characterized along four dimensions that have been shown to affect growth and poverty: resource richness, fragility, landlockedness and income status. To conclude, a portion of inequality in Africa can be attributed to inequality of opportunity, circumstances at birth that are major determinants of one’s poverty status as an adult.

318 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used household survey data from Nepal to investigate relationships between women empowerment in agriculture and production diversity on maternal and child dietary diversity and anthropometric and anthropological data.
Abstract: We use household survey data from Nepal to investigate relationships between women’s empowerment in agriculture and production diversity on maternal and child dietary diversity and anthropometric o...

250 citations


Cites result from "Understandings and Misunderstanding..."

  • ...The WEAI, a survey-based index using individual-level data collected from primary male and female respondents within the same households, is similar in construction to the Alkire-Foster group of multidimensional poverty indices (Alkire & Foster, 2011a, b)....

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References
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Journal ArticleDOI

5,417 citations


"Understandings and Misunderstanding..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Bourguignon and Satya Chakravarty [20], proposed a class of multidimensional poverty measures that extended the Foster Greer and Thorbecke (FGT) class of indices and discussed interrelationships among dimensions [ 31 ]....

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17 Oct 2011
TL;DR: As a measure of market capacity and not economic well-being, the authors pointed out that the two can lead to misleading indications about how well-off people are and entail the wrong policy decisions.
Abstract: As GDP is a measure of market capacity and not economic well-being, this report has been commissioned to more accurately understand the social progress indicators of any given state. Gross domestic product (GDP) is the most widely used measure of economic activity. There are international standards for its calculation, and much thought has gone into its statistical and conceptual bases. But GDP mainly measures market production, though it has often been treated as if it were a measure of economic well-being. Conflating the two can lead to misleading indications about how well-off people are and entail the wrong policy decisions. One reason why money measures of economic performance and living standards have come to play such an important role in our societies is that the monetary valuation of goods and services makes it easy to add up quantities of a very different nature. When we know the prices of apple juice and DVD players, we can add up their values and make statements about production and consumption in a single figure. But market prices are more than an accounting device. Economic theory tells us that when markets are functioning properly, the ratio of one market price to another is reflective of the relative appreciation of the two products by those who purchase them. Moreover, GDP captures all final goods in the economy, whether they are consumed by households, firms or government. Valuing them with their prices would thus seem to be a good way of capturing, in a single number, how well-off society is at a particular moment. Furthermore, keeping prices unchanged while observing how quantities of goods and services that enter GDP move over time would seem like a reasonable way of making a statement about how society’s living standards are evolving in real terms. As it turns out, things are more complicated. First, prices may not exist for some goods and services (if for instance government provides free health insurance or if households are engaged in child care), raising the question of how these services should be valued. Second, even where there are market prices, they may deviate from society’s underlying valuation. In particular, when the consumption or production of particular products affects society as a whole, the price that individuals pay for those products will differ from their value to society at large. Environmental damage caused by production or consumption activities that is not reflected in market prices is a well-known example.

4,432 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors proposed a new measure of poverty, which should avoid some of the shortcomings of the measures currently in use, and used an axiomatic approach to derive the measure.
Abstract: The primary aim of this paper is to propose a new measure of poverty, which should avoid some of the shortcomings of the measures currently in use. An axiomatic approach is used to derive the measure. The conception of welfare in the axiom set is ordinal. The information requirement for the new measure is quite limited, permitting practical use.

2,678 citations


"Understandings and Misunderstanding..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...The result is a methodology for measuring poverty in the sense of Sen (1976) that first identifies who is poor, then aggregates to obtain overall measures of poverty that reflect the multiple deprivations experienced by the poor....

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  • ...Our methodology has its roots in the literature on axiomatic poverty measurement (Sen, 1976), which – like related work in inequality and welfare indices – employs axioms to discern between measures....

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  • ...Following Sen (1976) we ask: Who is poor and how should overall poverty be measured in this setting?...

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01 Jan 2001
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the dimensions of poverty and how to create a better world, free of poverty, and explore the nature, and evolution of poverty to present a framework for action.
Abstract: This report focuses on the dimensions of poverty, and how to create a better world, free of poverty. The analysis explores the nature, and evolution of poverty, and its causes, to present a framework for action. The opportunity for expanding poor people's assets is addressed, arguing that major reductions in human deprivation are indeed possible, that economic growth, inequality, and poverty reduction, can be harnessed through economic integration, and technological change, dependent not only on the evolvement of markets, but on the choices for public action at the global, national, and local levels. Actions to facilitate empowerment include state institutional responsiveness in building social institutions which will improve well-being, and health, to allow increased income-earning potential, access to education, and eventual removal of social barriers. Security aspects are enhanced, by assessing risk management towards reducing vulnerability to economic crises, and natural disasters. The report expands on the dimensions of human deprivation, to include powerlessness and voicelessness, vulnerability and fear. International dimensions are explored, through global actions to fight poverty, analyzing global trade, capital flows, and how to reform development assistance to forge change in the livelihoods of the poor.

2,643 citations


"Understandings and Misunderstanding..." refers background in this paper

  • ...The 1997 Human Development Report [48] and the 2000/1 World Development Report [ 50 ] vividly introduced poverty as a multidimensional phenomenon, and the Millennium Declaration and MDGs have highlighted multiple dimensions of poverty since 2000....

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Posted Content
TL;DR: This paper proposed a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of an identification method ρk that extends the traditional intersection and union approaches, and a class of poverty measures Mα.
Abstract: This paper proposes a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of an identification method ρk that extends the traditional intersection and union approaches, and a class of poverty measures Mα. Our identification step employs two forms of cutoff: one within each dimension to determine whether a person is deprived in that dimension, and a second across dimensions that identifies the poor by ‘counting’ the dimensions in which a person is deprived. The aggregation step employs the FGT measures, appropriately adjusted to account for multidimensionality. The axioms are presented as joint restrictions on identification and the measures, and the methodology satisfies a range of desirable properties including decomposability. The identification method is particularly well suited for use with ordinal data, as is the first of our measures, the adjusted headcount ratio. We present some dominance results and an interpretation of the adjusted headcount ratio as a measure of unfreedom. Examples from the US and Indonesia illustrate our methodology.

2,040 citations


"Understandings and Misunderstanding..." refers background in this paper

  • ...This is a key motivation behind Alkire and Foster (2007, 2011)....

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  • ...23 For example see Alkire and Foster (2011) and Lasso de la Vega (2010); see also Alkire and Santos (2010) and Alkire, Santos, Seth, and Yalonetzky (2010).....

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  • ...…that satisfy decomposability, replication invariance, symmetry, poverty and deprivation focus, weak and dimensional monotonicity, nontriviality, normalisation, and weak rearrangement; while M1 and M2 satisfy monotonicity; and M2 satisfies a weak transfer property (Alkire and Foster 2011)....

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  • ...Alkire and Foster (2011) provide an example which first decomposes a population by ethnic group and then by dimension....

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  • ...In recent work we have attempted to offer a practical approach to identifying the poor and measuring aggregate poverty (Alkire and Foster 2011)....

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