On the Interaction Between Focus and Distributional Properties in Multidimensional Poverty Measurement

Suman Seth () and Maria Emma Santos ()
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Maria Emma Santos: Universidad Nacional del Sur (UNS)

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2019, vol. 145, issue 2, No 3, 503-521

Abstract: Abstract In the multidimensional poverty measurement literature, most measures satisfy the deprivation focus property, which means that they disregard any improvement in non-deprived achievements. Such measures cannot satisfy strong distributional properties as traditionally defined, because the distributional transformations among the poor are allowed to take place among their non-deprived achievements. We formally address this incompatibility and propose a set of alternative definitions of distributional properties that restrict distributional transformations to take place only among deprived achievements. This alternative definition allows discerning within the set of measures that satisfy the deprivation focus property, those that are strongly sensitive to distributional transformations from those that are not. With this new lens, we review some of the most prominent multidimensional poverty measures proposed in the literature and illustrate how measures within the same class as well as measures across different classes can be discerned from each other based on the alternative definitions.

Keywords: Poverty focus; Deprivation focus; Multidimensional poverty measurement; Transfer property; Rearrangement property; Distributional analysis; Censored achievements (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D3 D63 I3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11205-019-02110-2

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