[EQ] Counting and Multidimensional Poverty

Working Paper 7: Counting and Multidimensional Poverty

 

Sabina Alkire and James Foster
Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative -  Revised May 2008
Department of International Development - Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford

 

This working paper proposes a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of:
 (i)  an identification method that extends the traditional intersection and union approaches, and
 (ii) a class of poverty measures that satisfies a range of desirable properties including decomposability.

 

Available online as PDF file [42p.] at:

http://www.ophi.org.uk/pubs/Alkire_Foster_CountingMultidimensionalPoverty.pdf

 

“….MULTIDIMENSIONAL POVERTY has captured the attention of researchers and policymakers alike due, in part, to the compelling conceptual writings of Amartya Sen and the unprecedented availability of relevant data. A key direction for research has been the development of a coherent framework for measuring poverty in the multidimensional environment that is analogous to the set of techniques developed in unidimensional space.

 

Much attention has been paid to the aggregation step in poverty measurement through which the data are combined into an overall indicator of multidimensional

poverty. The major contributions have developed an array of multidimensional poverty measures and clarified the axioms they satisfy, primarily by extending well-established unidimensional poverty measures and axioms in new and interesting ways. 5 However each of the aggregation techniques relies on a prior identification step – namely, ‘who is poor?’ Considerably less attention has been given to this important component of a poverty methodology….”

 

Table of Contents

1. INTRODUCTION

2. UNIDIMENSIONAL MEASUREMENT

3. NOTATION

4. IDENTIFYING THE POOR

5. MEASURING POVERTY

6. PROPERTIES

7. THE ORDINAL CASE

7.1 Poverty as Unfreedom

7.2 Ordinal and Cardinal Data

8. GENERAL WEIGHTS

9. ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES

10. CONCLUDING REMARKS

 

 

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