Subgroup Consistent Poverty Indices

Multidimensional poverty indices

This paper explores the axiomatic foundation of multidimensional poverty indices. Departing from the income approach which measures poverty by aggregating shortfalls of incomes from a predetermined poverty-line income, a multidimensional index is a numerical representation of shortfalls of basic needs from some pre-speci®ed minimum levels. The class of subgroup consistent poverty indices introd...

Robustness Properties of Poverty Indices

Drawing on recent work concerning the statistical robustness of inequality statistics we examine the sensitivity of poverty indices to data contamination using the concept of the influence function. We show that poverty and inequality indices have fundamentally different robustness properties, and demonstrate that an important commonly used subclass of poverty measures will be robust under data...

Consistent Poverty Comparisons and Inference

On Multidimensional Indices of Poverty

Value Judgements in Multidimensional Poverty Indices

After a slow start in the 1980’s and 1990’s empirical applications of the capability approach have gained significant momentum in recent years, thanks in large part to technical and methodological advances in the multidimensional measurement of poverty (Alkire & Foster, 2011; Bourguignon & Chakravarty, 1999; Duclos, Shan, & Younger, 2006). As we progress in this direction, we come across an inc...