Poverty is a paradoxical state. Recognizable in the eld for any sensitive observer who travels in remote rural areas and urban slums and meets marginalized people in a given society, poverty still remains a challenge to conceptual formalization and to measurement that is consistent with such formalization. The analysis of poverty is multidisciplinary. It goes from ethics to economics, from political science to human biology, and any type of measurement rests on mathematics. Moreover, poverty is multifaceted according to the types of deprivation, and it is also gender and age speci c. A vector of variables is required, which raises a substantial problem for individual and group comparisons necessary to equity analysis. Multidimension- ity also complicates the aggregation necessary to perform the ef ciency analysis of policies. In the case of income poverty, these two problems, equity and ef ciency, have bene ted from very signi cant progress in the eld of economics. Similar achievements are still to come in the area of multidimensional poverty. Within this general background, this book has a very modest and narrow-scoped objective. It proposes an operational methodology for measuring multidimensional poverty, independent from the conceptual origin, the size and the qualitative as well as the quantitative nature of the primary indicators used to describe the poverty of an individual, a household or a sociodemographic entity.
This book puts forward an operational methodology for measuring multidimensional poverty, independent from the conceptual origin, size and qualitative as well as quantitative nature of the primary indicators used to describe the poverty of an individual, household or socio-demographic entity. It allows for the integration of the sets of techniques already available or forthcoming in the area of income poverty into the analysis of multidimensional poverty. The core of the methodology rests on a solution to the issue of aggregation across the multiple sub-dimensions of poverty. The rationale of the proposed solution is based on the exploration of the internal structure of association between these sub-dimensions of poverty. The author illustrates the conceptual debates on the dimensions of poverty and on the measurement methodologies with empirical studies showing the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches by dividing the book into two parts. The first part, which is theoretical, develops the rationale underlying the proposed methodology with numerical examples. The second part presents two case studies, one from Vietnam and the other from Senegal, using the methodology outlined in the first part. Both case studies are based on large household surveys implemented by the different national statistical offices. The unique structure of this book makes it practical for use by poverty and policy researchers, professionals in international development, and graduate students interested in poverty and inequality.
