International and national experts will gather at ECLAC headquarters in Santiago on March 4-5 to analyse proposals for measuring poverty from a multidimensional perspective and study their empirical application in countries of the region.
The
International Seminar “Multidimensional Poverty Measurement in
Latin America” is organized by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean, the Ministry of Planning and Cooperation of Chile, the
Foundation for Overcoming Poverty and the Oxford Poverty and Human
Development Initiative (OPHI).
Measuring poverty in a multidimensional approach has become
increasingly important in recent years due to the emergence of new
conceptual frameworks, such as defining poverty from a rights or a
human development perspective. Under this new conception of public
policies, poverty is defined not only as the insatisfaction of basic
needs, but also and above all, as the deprivation of capabilities,
the loss of freedom and the denial of citizenship, understood as
lacking access to fundamental rights.
In general, multidimensional poverty measurement requires: a)
selecting the dimensions of well-being to be included, b) defining
minimum thresholds for each of these dimensions, and c) aggregating
these different dimensions in synthetic index. The first two steps
are essential, because they imply determining the basic guarantees
needed for an adequate participation in society.
However, there may not be “a solution” that can be applied in every
context for selecting dimensions and thresholds, and this has to do
with the ambiguity of the meaning of rights and primarily with the
economic cost of their provision.
Aggregating the different dimensions in a synthetic index meets with
the problem of comparability among the
different distributions of well-being. The
combination rules of the different dimensions must
be defined in order to estimate the cutoffs and
differentiate, multi-dimensionally, the poor from the non-poor. For
example, some may consider more important to establish if people are
being deprived of income, access to health
or education, while others will be more interested
in establishing if people are being deprived of these same things
simultaneously.
Over recent years, numerous methodologies for deriving
multidimensional poverty indexes have been suggested. The most
recent approximations have been based on the compliance of a set of
desirable properties, or axioms.
For example, Alkire and Foster (2007) developed a method for
multidimensional poverty measurement based on extending the axioms
traditionally used in the field of monetary metrics (particularly
those applied in FGT measurements) to non-monetary fields. This
method complies with the basic axioms, allows different pondering
schemes and facilitates the definition of cutoffs taking into
account the severity and amount of deprivations and may be used with
quantitative and qualitative variables.
In addition, the interest in multidimensional poverty measurement
has led to analysing the feasibility of including
indicators of the “lost dimensions” of poverty,
such as subjective aspects like empowerment, perceptions of
insecurity and violence and the capacity of feeling dignified and
respected by others 1 . It is open to
discussion whether these subjective measurements are really
dimensions of poverty. Additionally, the problems of the
availability, quality and comparability of data must be tackled.
1 See OPHI website (Oxford Poverty &
Human Development Initiative),
http://www.ophi.org.uk/subindex.php?id=publications0