This article was originally published in October 2017.
On the robustness of multidimensional counting poverty orderings
Multidimensional poverty measures, based on counts of dimensions in which individuals are deprived, have gained prominence in recent decades. Many governments and international institutions, in developed and developing countries alike, have adopted counting poverty measures in order to monitor poverty trends. Recent examples include World Bank (2016), the ‘Multidimensional Poverty Index’ used by UNDP in its Human Development Reports since UNDP (2010), and the measures of people at risk of poverty and social exclusion currently used by Eurostat to assess living conditions in Europe (Eurostat, 2014).
Researchers Jose Gallegos, Gaston Yalonetzky and Life Course Centre Fellow Francisco Azpitarte have recently published a working paper proposing new dominance criteria for multidimensional counting poverty measures that allow the analyst to evaluate the robustness of poverty comparisons.
They say, ‘Our findings indicate that poverty comparisons based on counting measures can be highly sensitive to changes in dimensional weights, cut-offs and poverty functions. Given the growing prominence of this type of measures in social policy and academic debates, it is crucial to have dominance conditions that allow the systematic evaluation of poverty orderings to changes in those methodological choices. This papers constitutes as important step in this direction.’
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