A Multidimensional Approach to Measuring Poverty and the Assessment of Educational Poverty in Iran

A Multidimensional Approach to Measuring Poverty and the Assessment of Educational Poverty in Iran1   E. Aboonoori, Ph.D. * A.A. Saalem, Ph.D. ** J. Arab Yaarmohammadi ***   A multidimensional approach to measuring poverty facilitates the assessment of educational poverty as one of its several dimensions. Utilizing this approach, the overall poverty in Iran in the years of 2005 and 2015 is measured and then the share of its educational dimension and its subsets that include the educational status of the head of household, and that of the children, are calculated. Furthermore, different provinces were categorized in this regard into two categories of having educational poverty and extreme educational poverty. Results show that the educational dimension has the highest share among all constituents of overall poverty as it counts for nearly 50% of overall poverty. The extent of educational poverty in urban and rural areas of the country in 2015 is 42% and 66%, while that of extreme educational poverty in these areas is 3% and 0.9% respectively, showing a decrease compared to 2005. In 2015, the province of Kurdistan had the highest urban educational poverty, while the highest rural educational poverty was in Qom province. The province of Sistan and Baluchestan shows the highest level of extreme educational poverty in both areas. Keywords: educational poverty, multidimensional poverty, Alkire-Foster (AF) Method, adjusted headcount ratio JEL Classification: I32, I21, I24   _______________________ 1. This paper is derived from the corresponding author’s doctoral dissertation. Date received: Jan. 14, 2018                    Date accepted: Jun. 9, 2018 * Professor of Economics, Semnan University, [email protected] ** Assistant Professor of Theoretical Economics, Allameh Tabataba’i University, [email protected] *** Doctoral Student in Economics, Semnan University (Corresponding author), [email protected]