In the wake of the renewed interest in multidimensional poverty measurement, a natural question arising is how and whether indices of multidimensional poverty can be adapted to produce measures that quantify both the joint incidence of multiple deprivations and their degree of persistence, i.e. their chronicity. In this paper we seek to build one bridge between these two literatures (on multidi...

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...

Composite indices have been prominently used in poverty research. However, validity of these indices remains subject to debate. This paper examines the validity of a common type of composite poverty indices using data from a cross-sectional survey of 2477 households in urban and rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Multiple-group comparisons in structural equation modelling were employed for test...

Opportunity-Sensitive Poverty Measurement We axiomatically characterize two classes of poverty measures which are sensitive to inequality of opportunity – one a strict subset of the other. The proposed indices are sensitive not only to income shortfalls from the poverty line, but also to differences in opportunities faced by people with different pre-determined characteristics, such as race or ...

This paper introduces a measure of distribution-sensitivity, which is similar to Arrow-Pratt's measure of risk aversion, for a poverty index. The measure also gauges poverty aversion and has a clear and straightforward interpretation. Using this measure, we can define various classes of minimum distribution-sensitive poverty indices. We show that the ordering condition for such a class of pover...

Recent advances in the measurement of bi-dimensional poverty are applied to a measure of poverty which incorporates income and health poverty. The correlation between income and poverty is examined using the Receiver Operating Characteristics curve. Following from this unidimensional and bi-dimensional poverty indices are calculated for Ireland for the years 2003-2006. Individual and bi-dimensi...

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...