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Measuring The Many Faces Of Poverty:

Multidimensional Poverty Measurement

New York. March, 2013

Second Conference On Measuring Human ProgressUnited Nations Development Program

Gonzalo Hernández Licona

Importance of multidimensional poverty measures

1. Must be part of the measurement of progress/development, along with GDP and inequality: Social contract of countries.

2. Income is important, but other dimensions are important for their own sake. Access to education, health, housing, food are social rights.

3. These measures link measurement to public policy• One of the motivations for the MPI was the

importance for public policy in Mexico (2007-8)

• Unlike the income measure, with a multidimensional approach, various public programs/actions can be reflected directly in poverty.

Achievements of MPI

• Because of the previous reasons, MPI and similar methods are VERY IMPORTANT TO MEASURE HUMAN PROGRESS. They are here to stay!

• MPI competes well with the income indicator. We suggest that HDRO continues to use an MPI-type indicator.

• MPI based on household survey information, microdata and reliable surveys. Based on household data.

• It is decomposable.

Using the Mexican experience

• Union or Intersection. • Intersection. • Union leads to 90%; thus it is not useful to

prioritize public policy; all those in poverty are in fact very different form each other.

• H ior M0. • Both! For communications H, but M0 is a neat

indicatos. • We use both separately: H and Nr. of average

deprivations.• Include inequality. • This is trickier (but Sabina and James may have

an idea), • I would introduce it by focusing on extreme

poverty explicitly.

Vulnerable due toincome

Social RightsDeprivations

EWL

035 24 16

Wellb

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POVERTY

46.2 %, 2.5 deprivations on average

Non poor and non

vulnerable

Poverty identification

• Educational gap•Access to Health•Access to Social

Security •Quality of Housing

• Basic services in dwelling •Access to Food

Vulnerable due to social

deprivations

Moderate poverty

Social RightsDeprivations

EWL

EXTREME poverty10.4%; 3.7 deprivations

03

Vulnerable people by

social deprivation

s

Vulnerable due toincome

5 24 16

Non poor and non

vulnerable

MWL Public policy

Extreme PovertyW

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The paper. Specific comments

• Cooking fuel indicator IN or OUT. • IN. I would not take it out; I accept sometimes is

difficult to measure, but this indicator is important for poverty, especially in rural areas.

• Households with non-eligible individuals and economies of scale. • Kalsen’s suggestion might be interesting, but

since education, health, food are social rights, we suggest to measure poverty at the individual level.

• I would use individual access to education, health, food.

Go local

• MPI is a global measure; it is important to have global measures for poverty. But there are some difficulties with being global (data, comparability, specific country needs and values..).

• We also need countries to engage in local measures; countries have always something to say about the way they see themselves.

• And they should have also poverty measures at subnational level!

• I would suggest to look at the specific Mexican (and Colombian) case. The measure was thought for public policy purposes and the governments, federal and local, are using it for many purposes