A Report on Mexican Multidimensional Poverty Measurement

This report addresses the challenges arising from a change in Mexico’s official poverty methodology from an income-only basis to a multidimensional basis that includes education, access to health services, access to social security, shelter characteristics, access to basic services, access to food, and level of social cohesion. The concept of poverty underlying this report is drawn from Amartya Sen’s capability approach. The specific multidimensional measurement framework used is that of Alkire and Foster (2007). Special emphasis is placed on the measure’s population decomposability and dimensional decomposability. The new identification and aggregation methods are then applied to 2005 data provided by CONEVAL to illustrate the feasibility of the methodology and the kinds of results that one might obtain.