Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Measurement (Revised and Updated)

James E. Foster Sabina Alkire
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: James E. Foster () and Sabina Alkire

No 32, OPHI Working Papers from Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford

Abstract: This paper proposes a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of an identification method ρκ ('rho-kapa') that extends the traditional intersection and union approaches, and a class of poverty measures Μα ('Mu-alpha'). Our identification step employs two forms of cutoff: one within each dimension to determine whether a person is deprived in that dimension, and a second across dimensions that identifies the poor by 'counting' the dimensions in which a person is deprived. The aggregation step employs the FGT measures, appropriately adjusted to account for multidimensionality. The axioms are presented as joint restrictions on identification and the measures, and the methodology satisfies a range of desirable properties including decomposability. The identification method is particularly well suited for use with ordinal data, as is the first of our measures, the adjusted headcount ratio. We present some dominance results and an interpretation of the adjusted headcount ratio as a measure of unfreedom. Examples from the US and Indonesia illustrate our methodology.

Date: 2009-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ophi.org.uk/working-paper-number-32/ (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:qeh:ophiwp:ophiwp032

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OPHI Working Papers from Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford Queen Elizabeth House 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3TB United Kingdom. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by IT Support ().