Did Poverty Reduction Reach the Poorest of the Poor? Complementary Measures of Poverty and Inequality in the Counting Approach

Suman Seth () and Sabina Alkire

A chapter in Research on Economic Inequality, 2017, vol. 25, pp 63-102 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract: A number of multidimensional poverty measures that respect the ordinal nature of dimensions have recently been proposed within the counting approach framework. Besides ensuring a reduction in poverty, however, it is important to monitor distributional changes to ensure that poverty reduction has been inclusive in reaching the poorest. Distributional issues are typically captured by adjusting a poverty measure to be sensitive to inequality among the poor. This approach, however, has certain practical and conceptual limitations. It conflicts, for example, with some policy-relevant measurement features, such as the ability to decompose a measure into dimensions post-identification and does not create an appropriate framework for assessing disparity in poverty across population subgroups. In this chapter, we propose and justify the use of a separate decomposable inequality measure – a positive multiple of “variance” – to capture the distribution of deprivations among the poor and to assess disparity in poverty across population subgroups. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach through two contrasting inter-temporal illustrations using Demographic Health Survey data sets for Haiti and India.

Keywords: Inequality decomposition; inequality among the poor; multidimensional poverty; counting approach; variance decomposition; Haiti; India; D63; O1; I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:reinzz:s1049-258520170000025005

DOI: 10.1108/S1049-258520170000025005

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