Memo to : Coneval Memo from : Sabina Alkire

We understand that the Committee may be contemplating a methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement based on the general approach we proposed in a recent paper (Alkire and Foster, 2007). While there is some broad agreement on the aggregation method – in particular, the adjusted headcount M0 is a natural pick since it satisfies dimensional monotonicity and can be decomposed across dimensions (unlike the multidimensional headcount H) and can be applied to ordinal data – there may be less agreement on how to proceed with the identification step. We have recently revisited this topic and would like to take this opportunity to share our thoughts with you. This memo presents a concrete and intuitive proposal for your consideration.