Assessing individuals' deprivation in a multidimensional framework

Iñaki Permanyer

Journal of Development Economics, 2014, vol. 109, issue C, 1-16

Abstract: In the context of multidimensional poverty measurement, it seems plausible to assume that when individuals are deprived in some dimensions and non-deprived in the remaining ones, the latter can be allowed to play a non-trivial role in the assessment of those individuals' poverty levels. Yet, this simple and attractive property is violated by virtually all multidimensional poverty indices proposed in the literature so far because they stick to the so-called ‘Strong Focus’ axiom. This paper characterizes a class of multidimensional poverty indices that allows for certain trade-offs between deprived and non-deprived attributes when measuring individuals' deprivation. The empirical results based on ‘Demographic and Health Surveys’ from 54 countries suggest that our assessments of multidimensional poverty can differ dramatically when the overly restrictive Strong Focus is abandoned in favor of weaker versions of the axiom.

Keywords: Multidimensional poverty measurement; Axiomatization; Focus axiom; Sensitivity analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I3 I32 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387814000352
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:deveco:v:109:y:2014:i:c:p:1-16

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2014.03.005

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().