Inequality among the Multidimensionally Poor in over 100 countries

Monday, March 1, 2021
10:00am – 11:15am
via WebEx

Inequality among the poor matters because it matters that the poorest poor are not left behind. Leaving them behind is very often the case, as they are at the crossroads of marginalized groups and it is very difficult for policies -even at sub-national levels- to actually and effectively reach them. In this paper we examine inequality within over 100 countries among the multidimensionally poor, as measured by the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (G-MPI). We compare two approaches proposed so far for incorporating inequality into the measurement of multidimensional poverty. One is the ‘assimilated approach’, by which the poverty measure incorporates sensitivity to inequality among the poor, as it is the case of the MGamma class of poverty measures proposed by Alkire and Foster (2016, 2019); this uses a relative inequality measure. The other is the ‘complementary approach’, by which the poverty measure is complemented alongside the variance of deprivation scores among the poor, an absolute inequality measure.

We find that country rankings by absolute vs. relative inequality among the poor differ quite substantially, which suggests that the selection of one or the other type of inequality matters when only that aspect of poverty is evaluated. However, the country ranking by the G-MPI, which considers poverty incidence and intensity, is highly robust to the incorporation of inequality into measurement of poverty, either using the MGamma2 measure or complementing the G-MPI with the variance among the poor. In other words: bad things seem to go together. Countries with a higher proportion of their population in multidimensional poverty tend to have higher average poverty intensity, and such higher average intensity tends to be more unequally distributed among the poor. This does not mean that it does not matter to know and measure inequality among the poor. A high inequality among the poor signals the need to develop different kinds of policies according to different poverty intensities. Our understanding is that it is the distribution of the deprivation scores alongside the dimensional decomposition what can be more illuminating for designing effective policies to leave no-one behind.

About the speakers:

Maria Emma Santos is an Assistant Professor at Dept. of Economics at Universidad Nacional del Sur and a CONICET Research Fellow at the Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur, Bahia Blanca, Argentina. She is also a Research Associate to the Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Humano (CEDH) of Universidad de San Andres in Argentina, and to the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, at the University of Oxford, UK. Together with Sabina Alkire, she developed the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, published in the Human Development Report since 2010. She works on measurement and analysis of multidimensional poverty.

Heriberto Tapia has been a senior member of the writing-research team at the Human Development Report Office (HDRO) since 2014. 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 a 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.

Hector Moreno is a Research Officer at OPHI. He supports OPHI’s outreach team in building, updating and statistically assessing national multidimensional poverty indices (MPIs) in Asian and Latin-American countries. Previously, he served as Research Coordinator for the Human Development Research Office at the UNDP Mexico, and as Under Director of Poverty Methodologies for the Mexican government at CONEVAL. He has also been a consultant for private, public and international institutions. He has taught multiple courses in Statistics at Sciences Po Paris in France and a variety of courses in Economics at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico. He has refereed the Journal of Economic Inequality (Elsevier), the Politicas Públicas Journal (Tec de Monterrey) and the Review of Economics and Statistics (MIT). He holds a PhD in Economics (Paris School of Economics).

Sabina Alkire directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). She is the Associate Professor of Development Studies in the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis, welfare economics, the capability approach, the measurement of freedoms and human development. From 2015–16, Sabina was Oliver T Carr Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics at George Washington University. Previously, she worked at the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University, the Human Security Commission, and the World Bank’s Poverty and Culture Learning and Research Initiative. She holds a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford.

James E. Foster is the Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs, Professor of Economics, and Co-Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the George Washington University. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University. Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His work underlies many well-known social indices including the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) published annually by the UNDP in the Human Development Report, dozens of national MPIs used to guide domestic policy against poverty, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) at USAID, the Gross National Happiness Index of Bhutan, the Better Jobs Index of the InterAmerican Development Bank, and the Statistical Performance Index of the World Bank. Prof. Foster received his PhD in Economics from Cornell University and has a Doctorate Honoris Causa from Universidad Autónoma del Estado Hidalgo (Mexico).

This event and seminar series was jointly organized with the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the UNDP Human Development Report Office.