Paris School of Economics - L'Agence Française de Développement

The issues to be covered notably included the increasing use made of various types of household
surveys and their limits, whether the focus is on economic well-being, health or poverty when
defined as a truly multi-dimensional concept. Attention was also drawn to the new indicators
that summarise the various aspects of development through the average individual subjective
satisfaction of a population and how this may compare with more traditional objective measures.
On a different topic, special focus was given to the issue of “development sustainability”,
in particular through the concept of “net effective savings”, which takes into account the
consumption or depreciation of various stocks of natural, material, human or social resources.
The specific topics covered by the various papers and discussions in this volume are:
International pricing, national accounts, and household surveys:
how can these data inform us on standards of living, poverty and inequality?
Today, we have more and better quality measures of economic development than ever before.
Household surveys are constantly growing in number and availability, providing us not only with
data on household income and expenditure, but also direct measures on health, particularly
on anthropometrics, infant mortality, and self-reported material and emotional well-being.
The latest round of the International Comparison Project (ICP) collected prices of comparable
goods in 146 countries, many of which had not yet come under study. These data bring new ideas
and new insights on national and individual economic development.Yet, there are persistent
problems of interpretation and consistency between these different types of data. Why is world
poverty not retreating as quickly as one might expect in view of global economic growth?
Why are Indians consuming fewer and fewer calories when their nutritional status is so low
and their incomes rising rapidly? Why does economic growth not always tie up with an improved
feeling of well-being in a population? And how should we interpret the pronounced increases
in poverty and inequality estimates shown by the ICP.
The multidimensionality of poverty
The multidimensionality of poverty is very inadequately accounted for in conventional statistics.
The indicator most often used is “monetary poverty”, which is generally defined as monetary
income (or consumption) below an arbitrarily set threshold. However, other kinds of deprivation,
such as no access to basic infrastructure, health care, education or public decision-making are
equally important — and do not neatly correlate with income.
So far in the research on poverty, the spotlight has been on “monetary poverty”, while data
on access to safe drinking water, infant mortality, illiteracy or political participation have been
treated separately. Recent studies have tried to remedy this approach by integrating the different
dimensions of poverty. In line with Sen’s “capability” approach, they explore different types
of deprivation that reflect the various facets of poverty. They also pay particular attention to areas
where these different dimensions may overlap when one is assessing the severity of poverty.
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] © AFD / Measure for Measure / How Well Do We Measure Development? / December 2011