The Measurement of Multidimensional Poverty

François Bourguignon and Satya Chakravarty

A chapter in Poverty, Social Exclusion and Stochastic Dominance, 2019, pp 83-107 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Many authors have insisted on the necessity of defining poverty as a multidimensional concept rather than relying on income or consumption expenditures per capita. Yet, not much has actually been done to include the various dimensions of deprivation into the practical definition and measurement of poverty. Existing attempts along that direction consist of aggregating various attributes into a single index through some arbitrary function and defining a poverty line and associated poverty measures on the basis of that index. This is merely redefining more generally the concept of poverty, which then essentially remains a one-dimensional concept. The present paper suggests that an alternative way to take into account the multidimensionality of poverty is to specify a poverty line for each dimension of poverty and to consider that a person is poor if he/she falls below at least one of these various lines. The paper then explores how to combine these various poverty lines and associated one-dimensional gaps into multidimensional poverty measures. An application of these measures to the rural population in Brazil is also given with poverty defined on income and education.

Keywords: Multidimensional; Poverty measure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Measurement of Multidimensional Poverty (2019)
Working Paper: The Measurement of Multidimensional Poverty (2019)
Journal Article: The Measurement of Multidimensional Poverty (2003)
Working Paper: The Measurement of Multidimensional Poverty (1998)
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:spr:thechp:978-981-13-3432-0_7

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9789811334320

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-13-3432-0_7

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Themes in Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().