Acute Multidimensional Poverty: A New Index for Developing ... - OPHI

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Acute Multidimensional Poverty: A New Index for Developing CountriesAlkire & Santosattending school. Years of schooling acts as a proxy for the level of knowledge and understandingof household members. While years of schooling is an imperfect proxy, not capturing the quality ofeducation nor the level of knowledge attained, nor skills, it is a robust indicator, widely available, andprovides the closest feasible approximation to levels of education for household members. It can beconceived as a relatively good proxy of functionings that require education: literacy, numeracy, andunderstanding of information. Because the unit of analysis is the household, all household membersare considered non-deprived if at least one person has five years of schooling. This variable followsthe idea of effective literacy of Basu and Foster (1998) that all household members benefit from theabilities of a literate person in the household, regardless of each person’s actual level of education. Itis also linked to the idea of external capabilities (Foster and Handy, 2008).Similarly all household members are considered deprived if any of their school-age children are notattending grades 1 to 8 of school. Once again, school attendance does not capture completion,quality of schooling, or skills. But it is the best indicator possible to indicate whether or not schoolagedchildren are being exposed to a learning environment. Given the data restrictions, we considerit to be a sufficiently good proxy of educational functionings. The intuition of considering allhousehold members deprived if one or more children are not attending school relates to externaleffects. When a child is not in school, the household’s current and future knowledge and abilities arereduced. Note that households with no school-aged children are considered non-deprived. Henceincidence of deprivation in this indicator will reflect the demographic structure of the household andcountry as well as the educational attainments. Empirical studies suggest that this indicator providesdifferent and complementary information to mean years of schooling (Santos et al, 2010).Furthermore, this indicator will be immediately sensitive to policy changes, whereas mean years ofschooling will change more slowly. Moreover the indicator of children attending school is justifiedby a number of distinct sources that have attained a high degree of consensus: the MDGs includeachieving universal primary education; ‘echoing’ the MDGs, UNESCO’s Education For All 2010report specifically analyzes possible solutions for making sure that no children are excluded fromschooling; and the Unsatisfied Basic Needs approach typically includes this indicator.Health was the most difficult dimension to measure. Comparable indicators of health for allhousehold members are generally missing from household surveys. Yet the capability to live a longand healthy life is a basic capability and is also the prerequisite for much of human development. Weuse two health indicators that, although related, depart significantly from standard health indicators.The first identifies a person as deprived in nutrition if anyone in their household is malnourished.Malnutrition is a direct indicator of functionings. For children, malnutrition can have life-longeffects in terms of cognitive and physical development. Adults or children who are malnourished arealso susceptible to other health disorders; they are less able to learn and to concentrate and may notperform as well at work.This being said, malnutrition indicators (BMI for adults, weight for age for children) are imperfect;they do not reflect micronutrient deficiencies. Also, we do not consider the problem of obesity.Moreover, some people may appear to be technically malnourished who are not (due to body type)or their nutritional status may be not be due to poverty (it may be due to alimentary disorders orfashion norms or a recent illness for example).We wish to emphasise one key feature of our indicators on nutrition that might confuse the readerand which relates to the special construction of our measure. In the MPI all household members areconsidered to be deprived in nutrition if at least one undernourished person is observed in thewww.ophi.org.uk July 2010 14
Acute Multidimensional Poverty: A New Index for Developing CountriesAlkire & Santoshousehold. 17 Therefore, it is fundamental to note that when we present deprivation rates by indicator(censored headcounts), these estimates depart from the standard nutritional statistics. The standard measuresrefer to the percentage of undernourished population (number of malnourished people divided bytotal set people under consideration, such as percentage of underweight children). In our measurethey refer to those identified as multidimensionally poor and who live in a household where at leastone member is undernourished (both the numerator and the denominator of our indicators aredifferent). Our estimate can be either higher or lower than the standard nutritional indicator becausea) it counts as deprived people who are not undernourished themselves but in a household wheresomebody else is; b) it depends on the distribution of malnutrition in the population and the size ofthe households with malnourishment; 18 and c) we consider as non-deprived people in householdswhere no one was measured. 19 Once again, note that although considering the household as the unitof analysis is not ideal, it is intuitive: the household experiences an external negative effect by thepresence of a malnourished person.The second indicator uses data on child mortality. The death of a child is a total health functioningfailure – one that is direct and tragic, and that influences the entire household. Most, although notall, child deaths are preventable, being caused by infectious disease or diarrhea; child malnutritionalso contributes to child death.This indicator is particularly problematic. It is a stock indicator, because the year of death of thechild is not recorded in most surveys – so the death could have happened many years ago. Howevergiven the absence of health functioning information on household members, it provides at leastrudimentary information on health functionings.In the MPI all household members are considered to be deprived if there has been at least oneobserved child death (of any age) in the household. 20 It is fundamental to note that this indicatordiffers from the standard mortality statistics. The standard under-five mortality rate is the number ofdeaths of children 0-5 years per 1000 children born alive. Here, it is the percentage of people17 Unfortunately the exact definition of the deprived in nutrition varies depending on the survey used: when we useDHS, it refers to child or women in reproductive age being undernourished; when we use MICS, the household isconsidered deprived if there is at least one undernourished child (this survey does not provide information on adults’nutrition); when we use the WHS, the household is considered deprived when the respondent (either men or women,any age) is undernourished (this survey does not provide information on children’s nutrition).There are two countryspecificsurveys used, in Argentina, and Mexico. In Argentina the indicator coincides with that used with DHS. In theMexican survey all household members were measured, so the household is deprived if there is any undernourishedmember.18 If the malnourished are concentrated in a few households and the size of these households is not excessively large, ourestimates will tend to be lower than the standard measure. On the other hand, if the malnourished are distributed oneperhousehold (as it could happen with a very unequal distribution of food resources within the household), ourestimates will tend to be higher than the standard measure.19 Given that the information on nutrition was limited in each survey to a particular group, we have had to follow thisassumption. Otherwise we would have had to drop all households where no-one was measured, which would haveimplied a significant loss of information and representativeness in the other indicators.20 The ‘eligible’ population for the mortality questionnaire varies slightly from one survey to the other, but on the basisof our analysis we think that – although not ideal – the comparison across the surveys is not unreasonable. In DHS, themortality data are obtained from women 15-49 and – in most countries – it is also obtained from men aged 15-59. InMICS it is obtained from all women 15-49 who are currently married or were married at some point. In WHS it isobtained from the respondent, when this is a woman between 18 and 52 years of age. In WHS we have also used a smallpart of the information provided by the questionnaire on sibling’s death, which is obtained from all respondents. This isexplained in the Data section.www.ophi.org.uk July 2010 15
Page 1 and 2: Oxford Poverty & Human Development
Page 5 and 6: Acute Multidimensional Poverty: A N
Page 13: Acute Multidimensional Poverty: A N
Page 65 and 66:
Acute Multidimensional Poverty: A N
Page 67 and 68:
Page 69 and 70:
Page 71 and 72:
Page 73 and 74:
Page 75 and 76:
Page 77 and 78:
Page 79 and 80:
Page 81 and 82:
Page 83 and 84:
Page 85 and 86:
Page 87 and 88:
Page 89 and 90:
Page 91 and 92:
Page 93 and 94:
Page 95 and 96:
Page 97 and 98:
Page 99 and 100:
Page 101 and 102:
Page 103 and 104:
Page 105 and 106:
Page 107 and 108:
Page 109 and 110:
Page 111 and 112:
Page 113 and 114:
Page 115 and 116:
Page 117 and 118:
Page 119 and 120:
Page 121 and 122:
Page 123 and 124:
Page 125 and 126:
Page 127 and 128:
Page 129 and 130:
Page 131 and 132:
Page 133 and 134:
Page 135 and 136:
Page 137 and 138:
Page 139:
show all

Acute Multidimensional Poverty: A New Index for Developing ... - OPHI

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?