An Application of the Alkire-Foster’s Multidimensional Poverty Index to Data from Madagascar: Taking Into Account the Dimensions of Employment and Gender Inequality

Mathias Kuepie and Eric Patrick FEUBI Pamen

Working Paper from Agence française de développement

Abstract: In this study, we build what we call the Malagasy Multidimensional Poverty Index (MALAMPI), which is an augmented-MPI. Here, in addition to the standard MPI dimensions (health, education and living standards), we add an additional and highly important dimension, namely employment, which is generally the sole means of production owned by poor or deprived people. Another shortcoming of the MPI approach is that it does not enable gender inequalities analysis. This is surprising since two out of the three dimensions of the classical MPI are individual attributes. In this study, we also provide a new methodology aiming at computing gender sensitive MPI-type indicators. We use data from the 2012-2013 Malagasy MDGs national survey. Results show that adding the employment dimension to the MPI framework consistently increases Multidimensional poverty in Madagascar, the poverty headcount moving from 56% to 72%. Using our newly developed gender-sensitive method, we bring to light a significant gender gap (about 7% of increase at the expense of women), while the classical comparison of poverty level between female-headed households and male-headed households would have led to the conclusion that women are not disadvantaged. We also bring to light the fact that the gender gap does not necessary decrease when the household seems advantaged in terms of monetary living standards quintiles or in terms of household professional status.

Keywords: Afrique; Madagascar (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22
Date: 2017-11-30
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published in Research Papers

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.afd.fr/sites/afd/files/2017-12/pr-43-M ... ubi-Pamen-Kuepie.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:avg:wpaper:en7752

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper from Agence française de développement Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AFD ().