Jose Manuel Roche

Beyond Headcount: Measures that Reflect the Breadth and Components of Child Poverty

This paper presents a new approach to child poverty measurement that reflects the breadth and components of child poverty. The Alkire and Foster method presented in this paper seeks to answer the question ‘who is poor’ by considering the intensity of each child’s poverty. Once children are identified as poor, the measures aggregate information on poor children’s deprivations in a way that can be broken down to see where and how children are poor. The resulting measures go beyond the headcount by taking into account the breadth, depth or severity of dimensions of child poverty. The paper illustrates one way to apply this method to child poverty measurement, using Bangladeshi data from four rounds of the Demographic Health Survey covering the period 1997–2007. Results for Bangladesh show that the AF adjusted headcount ratio adds value because it produces a different ranking than the simple headcount, because it also reflects the simultaneous deprivations children experience (intensity). Given this, we argue that child poverty should not be assessed only according to the incidence of poverty but also by the intensity of deprivations that batter poor children’s lives at the same time. The Bangladesh example is used to illustrate how to compute and interpret the child poverty figures, how the final measure can be broken down by groups and by dimensions in order to analyse child poverty, how to interpret changes over time, and how to undertake robustness checks concerning the poverty cut-off.

Sub-National Disparities and Inter-Temporal Evolution of Multidimensional Poverty Across Developing Countries

In 2010, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) in collaboration with the United National Development Programme (UNDP) introduced a new multidimensional measure of acute poverty for developing countries, referred to as the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) (Alkire and Santos, 2010). This paper focuses on the new analyses of sub-national decompositions and changes over time for 1.4 billion of the 1.65 billion MPI poor people identified by the MPI in 2011. It analyses the incidence, intensity and composition of multidimensional poverty at sub-national levels for 66 developing countries, and presents poverty estimates for 683 sub-national regions.

Multidimensional Poverty Measurement and Analysis: Chapter 1 - Introduction

This working paper presents the normative, empirical, and policy motivations for focusing on multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis in general, and one measurement approach in particular. The fundamental normative motivation is to create effective measures that better reflect poor people’s experience, so that policies using such measures reduce poverty. Such measures are needed because, empirically, income-poor households are (surprisingly) not well-matched to households carrying other basic deprivations like malnutrition; also the trends of income and non-income deprivations are not matched, and nor does growth ensure the reduction of social deprivations. And, a dashboard overlooks the interconnection between deprivations, which people experience and policies seek to address. Turning to policy, we close by discussing how the Alkire-Foster methodology we present in Working Paper 86 (“Multidimensional Poverty Measurement and Analysis: Chapter 5 – The Alkire-Foster Counting Methology”) may be used.

Data and Analysis

• The team collected the amount of dust produced in one basement while a train was being loaded out. • The floors were swept in approximately one hour intervals. • The rate of dust produced came to be 62.8 lbs. per hour within the basement that measured 9015 square foot.