From Income Poverty to Multidimensional Poverty: An International Comparison

Francesco Burchi, Nicole Rippin and Claudio Montenegro

Working Papers from University of Chile, Department of Economics

Abstract: The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development clearly recognizes that poverty is more than just the lack of a sufficient amount of income. However, some scholars argue that an income-based measure of poverty can sufficiently capture poverty in other dimensions. Unfortunately, the available international indicators of multidimensional poverty suffer from several weaknesses and cannot be directly compared with monetary measures of poverty. This paper provides two main contributions to the literature on poverty measurement and analysis. First, it proposes a theoretically and methodologically sound indicator of multidimensional poverty, called the Global Correlation Sensitive Poverty Index (G-CSPI), which addresses most of the problems present in other poverty indicators. Thanks to the massive I2D2 database of harmonized household surveys, the G-CSPI was calculated for more than 500 surveys, and the results show that it is stable and robust. Second, for the first time we were able to conduct a comparative analysis between income and multidimensional poverty, relying on the same dataset to calculate both. Previous cross-country evidence was based on very different surveys used for the computation of income and multidimensional poverty and even conducted in different years. Building on recent data for 92 countries, our analysis shows that the headcount ratio of extreme monetary poverty (USD1.90) is highly correlated with that of the G-CSPI, but that the relationship is clearly non-linear. Thus, we provided the first empirical evidence of the fact that income poverty is not a sufficiently good proxy for multidimensional poverty.

Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.uchile.cl/uploads/publicacion/0087f2ca ... 5b3b32edc7991627.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: From income poverty to multidimensional poverty—an international comparison (2018)
Working Paper: From income poverty to multidimensional poverty—an international comparison (2018)
Working Paper: From income poverty to multidimensional poverty—an international comparison (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:udc:wpaper:wp473

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Chile, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mohit Karnani ().