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Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Measurement

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Listed author(s):
  • Sabina Alkire and James Foster

Abstract

This paper proposes a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of an identification method ρκ that extends traditional approaches, and a class of poverty measures Ma that satisfies several desirable properties including decomposability. Our identification step employs two forms of cutoff: one within each dimension and a second across dimensions that identifies the poor by counting their deprivations. We aggregate using Foster-Greer-Thorbecke measures adjusted for multidimensionality. Our adjusted headcount ratio is well suited for use with ordinal data. Examples from Indonesia and the US illustrate our methodology.

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File URL: http://www3.qeh.ox.ac.uk/pdf/ophiwp/OPHIWP007.pdf
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Paper provided by Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford in its series OPHI Working Papers with number ophiwp007.

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Date of creation: Feb 2009
Handle: RePEc:qeh:ophiwp:ophiwp007
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Find related papers by JEL classification:
  • I3 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty
  • I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
  • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
  • O1 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development
  • H1 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government

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  1. #HEJC for 17/10/2013
    by paulmitchell1 in The Academic Health Economists' Blog on 2013-10-10 05:30:39
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