1,308 research outputs found
Understandings and Misunderstandings of Multidimensional Poverty Measurement
No full textMultidimensional 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.
Acute Multidimensional Poverty: A New Index for Developing Countries
No full textThis paper presents a new Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for 104 developing countries. It is the first time multidimensional poverty is estimated using micro datasets (household surveys) for such a large number of countries which cover about 78 percent of the world's population. The MPI has the mathematical structure of one of the Alkire and Foster poverty multidimensional measures and it is composed of ten indicators corresponding to same three dimensions as the Human Development Index: Education, Health and Standard of Living. The MPI captures a set of direct deprivations that batter a person at the same time. This tool could be used to target the poorest, track the Millennium Development Goals, and design policies that directly address the interlocking deprivations poor people experience. This paper presents the methodology and components in the MPI, describes main results, and shares basic robustness tests. --Poverty Measurement,Multidimensional Poverty,Capability Approach,Multidimensional Welfare,Human Development,HDI,HPI
Acute Multidimensional Poverty: A New Index for Developing Countries
No full textThis paper presents a new Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for 104 developing countries. It is the first time multidimensional poverty is estimated using micro datasets (household surveys) for such a large number of countries which cover about 78 percent of the world´s population. The MPI has the mathematical structure of one of the Alkire and Foster poverty multidimensional measures and it is composed of ten indicators corresponding to same three dimensions as the Human Development Index: Education, Health and Standard of Living. Our results indicate that 1,700 million people in the world live in acute poverty, a figure that is between the 2/day poverty rates. Yet it is no $1.5/day measure. The MPI captures direct failures in functionings that Amartya Sen argues should form the focal space for describing and reducing poverty. It constitutes a tool with an extraordinary potential to target the poorest, track the Millennium Development Goals, and design policies that directly address the interlocking deprivations poor people experience. This paper presents the methodology and components in the MPI, describes main results, and shares basic robustness tests.
Multidimensional Poverty and its Discontents
No full textMore data on non-income dimensions of poverty are available than at any previous time in history. Alongside this, multidimensional measurement methodologies have advanced considerably in the past fifteen years. These advances together have created new possibilities to measure multidimensional poverty at the local, national and international level. Yet the fact that overall measures can be constructed does not mean that they will necessarily add value. This paper focuses on the question of when, how and why certain multidimensional poverty measures add value, sketches the limits of the contribution, and introduces a set of standing questions. The key value-added of a rigorously implemented multidimensional poverty index is that it conveys additional information not captured in single-dimensional measures (or in a dashboard) on the joint distribution of disadvantage and the composition of poverty. It also provides a consistent account of the overall change in multidimensional poverty across time and space. The paper discusses the joint distribution approach to multidimensional poverty measurement and presents one class of poverty measures within this approach. It then introduces one recently implemented measure within this family: the 104-country Multidimensional Poverty Index 2010 and uses concrete examples to explain its construction further. For example, without weights one can only identify the multidimensionally poor by the union or the intersection approaches; by these approaches the 2010 MPI would have identified an average of 58% or 0% of people across the 104 countries as poor. It also shows how to ‘unfold’ the MPI by sub-group or dimension, and also by intensity – because similar ‘intensities’ of poverty can conceal different distributions of intensity among the poor. Pointing out the added value of multidimensional poverty indexes is not to suggest that single-dimensional measures be abandoned but rather supplemented. Investing further in multidimensional measures has the potential to generate significant advances in understanding and useful policy tools.
Concepts and Measures of Agency
No full textThis paper proposes a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of: (i) an identification method ?k that extends the traditional intersection and union approaches, and (ii) a class of poverty measures M? that satisfies a range of desirable properties including decomposability. Our identification step makes use of two forms of cutoffs: first, a cutoff within each dimension to determine whether a person is deprived in that dimension; second, a cutoff across dimensions that identifies the poor by counting the number of dimensions in which a person is deprived. The aggregation step employs the FGT measures, appropriately adjusted to account for multidimensionality. The identification method is particularly well suited for use with ordinal data, as is the first of our measures, the adjusted headcount ratio. We provide illustrative examples using data from Indonesia and the US to show how our methodology might be used in practice.
Designing the Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index (HDI)
No full textThis paper proposes a method for adjusting the HDI to reflect the distribution of human development achievements across the population, and across dimensions, using an inequality measure from the Atkinson family. We begin with a discussion of the proposed indices in an idealized setting where variables and their scales have been identified and the data are available. We then address the practical issues that arise when applying these methods to real data. The final section presents and evaluates another related approach.
Beyond Headcount: Measures that Reflect the Breadth and Components of Child Poverty
No full textThis paper presents a new approach to child poverty measurement that reflects the breadth and components of child poverty. The Alkire and Foster method presented in this paper seeks to answer the question ‘who is poor’ by considering the intensity of each child’s poverty. Once children are identified as poor, the measures aggregate information on poor children’s deprivations in a way that can be broken down to see where and how children are poor. The resulting measures go beyond the headcount by taking into account the breadth, depth or severity of dimensions of child poverty. The paper illustrates one way to apply this method to child poverty measurement, using Bangladeshi data from four rounds of the Demographic Health Survey covering the period 1997–2007. Results for Bangladesh show that the AF adjusted headcount ratio adds value because it produces a different ranking than the simple headcount, because it also reflects the simultaneous deprivations children experience (intensity). Given this, we argue that child poverty should not be assessed only according to the incidence of poverty but also by the intensity of deprivations that batter poor children’s lives at the same time. The Bangladesh example is used to illustrate how to compute and interpret the child poverty figures, how the final measure can be broken down by groups and by dimensions in order to analyse child poverty, how to interpret changes over time, and how to undertake robustness checks concerning the poverty cut-off.
Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) Oxford Department of International Development OPHI WORKING PAPER NO. 82 Multidimensional Poverty Measurement and Analysis: Chapter 1 -Introduction
No full textAbstract This working paper presents the normative, empirical, and policy motivations for focusing on multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis in general, and one measurement approach in particular. The fundamental normative motivation is to create effective measures that better reflect poor people's experience, so that policies using such measures reduce poverty. Such measures are needed because, empirically, income-poor households are (surprisingly) not well-matched to households carrying other basic deprivations like malnutrition; also the trends of income and non-income deprivations are not matched, and nor does growth ensure the reduction of social deprivations. And, a dashboard overlooks the interconnection between deprivations, which people experience and policies seek to address. Turning to policy, we close by discussing how the Alkire-Foster methodology we present in Alkire, Foster, Seth, Santos, Roch
Multidimensional Poverty: Measurement, Estimation, and Inference
No full textMultidimensional poverty measures give rise to a host of statistical hypotheses which are of interest to applied economists and policy-makers alike. In the specific context of the generalized Alkire-Foster (Alkire and Foster 2008) class of measures, we show that many of these hypotheses can be treated in a unified manner and also tested simultaneously using the minimum p-value methodology of Bennett (2010). When applied to study the relative state of poverty among Hindus and Muslims in India, these tests reveal novel insights into the plight of the poor which are not otherwise captured by traditional univariate approaches.
Electron-beam patterned self-assembled monolayers as templates for Cu electrodeposition and lift-off
No full textSelf-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of 4'-methylbiphenyl-4-thiol (MBP0) adsorbed on polycrystalline gold substrates served as templates to control electrochemical deposition of Cu structures from acidic solution, and enabled the subsequent lift-off of the metal structures by attachment to epoxy glue. By exploiting the negative-resist behaviour of MBP0, the SAM was patterned by means of electron-beam lithography. For high deposition contrast a two-step procedure was employed involving a nucleation phase around −0.7 V versus Cu2+/Cu and a growth phase at around −0.35 V versus Cu2+/Cu. Structures with features down to 100 nm were deposited and transferred with high fidelity. By using substrates with different surface morphologies, AFM measurements revealed that the roughness of the substrate is a crucial factor but not the only one determining the roughness of the copper surface that is exposed after lift-off.Peer reviewe
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