Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative

Oxford Department of International Development

Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford

Working Paper: 7.5

Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Meacsurement (Short Version)

This paper proposes a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of an identification method ρk 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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