Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021 Unmasking Disparities: Ethnicity, Race, and Gender
Mon, 11 October, 2021
11:00am - 12:15pm
Monday, October 11th, 2021
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. EDT
via Zoom
In this first event in the continuation of our seminar series on Multidimensional Poverty Measurement, jointly hosted by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford, the Human Development Report Office (HDRO) at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP) at George Washington University, speakers presented the extensive findings of the 2021 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (global MPI) Report Unmasking Disparities: Ethnicity, Race, and Gender. The global MPI Report is jointly produced by OPHI and HDRO, with results and report being updated each year. The 2021 global MPI presents findings on multidimensional poverty around the world, using the most recent data from 109 countries, covering 5.9 billion people, and including changes over time in 80 countries. For the first time, the 2021 global MPI includes findings for trends with up to three points in time, detailed disaggregations of global MPI results by racial and ethnic groups, gender of household head, and analyses on multidimensional poverty and the socio-economic implications of COVID-19.
About the Speakers:
Sabina Alkire (Director, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford) directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), a research centre within the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. Dr Alkire works on a new approach to measuring poverty and well-being that goes beyond the traditional focus on income and growth. This multidimensional approach to measurement includes social goals, such as health, education, nutrition, standard of living and other valuable aspects of life. She devised a new method for measuring multidimensional poverty with her colleague James Foster (OPHI Research Associate and Professor of Economics at George Washington University) that has advantages over other poverty measures and has been adopted by the Mexican Government, the Bhutanese Government in their ‘Gross National Happiness Index’ and the United Nations Development Programme. Dr Alkire has been called upon to provide input and advice to several initiatives seeking to take a broader approach to well-being rather than just economic growth, for example, the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (instigated by President Sarkozy); the United Nations Human Development Programme Human Development Report Office; the European Commission; and the UK’s Department for International Development.
Yanchun Zhang (Chief of Statistics, Human Development Report Office, United Nations Development Programme) has more than twenty years of quantitative research experience on a wide range of economic and sustainable development topics. She has published articles on international macroeconomics, climate change and development, economic vulnerabilities and social protection in refereed academic and policy journals.Prior to HDRO, she served as Chief of the Commodities Branch at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva from 2019 to 2020, leading analytical research, which includes a biennial statistics report State of Commodities Dependence, and capacity-building projects in a dozen of commodity dependent developing countries in Africa and Asia. Prior to that, she was Chief of the Commodity Policy Implementation and Outreach Section from 2014 to 2019, in charge of formulating demand-driven technical cooperation initiatives, mobilizing multilateral and bilateral funding sources and coordinating the preparation of publicity materials and press releases for outreach efforts.Before UNCTAD, she had worked at UNDP in New York from 2007 to 2013 as a Policy Specialist, conducting original research on emerging development topics that are strategically important for the organization. From 2003 to 2006, she was an assistant professor at San Francisco State University, teaching and researching on econometrics, statistics and macroeconomics. Prior to her academic career, she also worked for the World Bank’s Development Research Group.She holds Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Economics with specializations on econometrics, development economics and international economics from University of Virginia, U.S.A, and a B.A. degree in Economics with honors from Shanghai Fudan University, China.
Heriberto Tapia (Policy Specialist, Human Development Report Office, United Nations Development Programme) is a senior member of the writing-research team at HDRO. He has worked on Human Development Reports 2015, 2016 and 2017. Previously, he served in the Executive Office of UNDP (2012-2014) and in the Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean (1998-2005). He has worked as a consultant to the IMF, UNDP and ECLAC. Furthermore, he has been lecturer at Columbia University (New York), University of Chile (Santiago) and University Diego Portales (Santiago). Heriberto holds a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University, and a Master’s degree in economics and a Commercial Engineering degree from the University of Chile.
Sophie Scharlin-Pettee (Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford) supports the outreach team in policy programming. She has worked on the Changes over Time project, which focuses on trends in multidimensional poverty, harmonising earlier data to the specifications of the 2019 global Multidimensional Poverty Index (global MPI). Previously, she contributed to the data preparation, computation, analysis, and report publication for the global MPI revision in 2018 and the annual global MPI release in 2019.
Before OPHI, Sophie supported ESRC-funded research investigating dual career couples’ life course outcomes from a time-use, longitudinal, and cross-national perspective; she also interned at the Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights, where she delivered a background paper on the political economies of peace-building, among other research activities.