Multidimensional Poverty – Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP)

Gross National Happiness

November 7, 2023December 21, 2023Past Events

Monday, October 16th, 2023

IIEP was pleased to host the another installment in our multidimensional poverty series, joint with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report Office (HDRO) on Monday, October 16th, 2023. This seminar featured OPHI researcher Tshoki Zangmo discussing the concept of “Gross National Happiness”. The presentation centers around the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) and the development of Gross National Happiness Index in Bhutan using the Alkire-Foster method. The session features insights into the latest findings from the 2022 GNH Index, showcasing its pivotal role as a tool for informed policy decisions that prioritize the wellbeing and happiness of the populations of Bhutan. Attendees gained valuable insights into how the results from the GNH Index are actively shaping Bhutan’s national planning and budgeting processes.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Fiscal Policy in Multidimensional Poverty Reduction

April 25, 2023May 20, 2023Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Past Events

Wednesday, 15th March, 2023

In this paper we propose indicators of impact and spending effectiveness of fiscal interventions for multidimensional poverty reduction. We bring together CEQ’s fiscal incidence methodology with OPHI’s multidimensional poverty methodology, using an MPI with the 𝑀0 structure as the metric for evaluation. The effectiveness indicators in the multidimensional case need to simultaneously consider the best allocation of money across dimensions (which deprivations to lift?) and across households (to whom should they be lifted?). In the impact effectiveness indicator, the observed poverty reduction is compared against the optimal reduction that could have been achieved. In turn, the spending effectiveness indicator compares the observed spent budget with the minimum budget that could have been spent had the money been allocated optimally. We consider two alternative criteria to find the optimal allocation: one that prioritizes reducing poverty (either incidence or intensity) to the biggest number of people -the MaxN-LNOB criterion- and another which prioritizes reducing poverty among poorest poor -the LNOB-MaxN criterion- which is a form of prioritarianism. When household sizes are ignored or poverty identification is done at the individual level, the two criteria coincide. The proposed methodology can be implemented using cross-sectional household survey (or census) data, alongside information on the cost of removing each deprivation at the household level, and information on the public spending the government has allocated or plans to allocate to the dimensions under analysis. The methodology can be implemented ex-post, as an effectiveness assessment, as well as ex-ante, to guide a multidimensional poverty reduction programme.

Maria Emma Santos is a Research Associate at OPHI and a Post-Doctoral Fellow of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas (CONICET), Argentina. Her research interests include the measurement and analysis of chronic and multidimensional poverty, the quality of education, its determinants, and its role for poverty persistence. She is particularly interested in Latin American countries.

James Foster is the Oliver T. Carr, Jr., Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics 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 FGT poverty measures, the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), 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).

About The Series:

The Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP) at George Washington University and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), with the support of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report office (UNDP HDRO), are pleased to host a special seminar series on the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (global MPI). Goal 1 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to end poverty in all its forms and dimensions. The global MPI offers a tool to make progress towards this goal.

Bringing together the academic and policy spheres, this series of seminars will highlight topics such as race, ethnicity, gender, and caste, the statistical capacity of nations, social protection, the use of geospatial mapping in tracking poverty, poverty and refugees, and evaluating whether we’re on track to meet UN SDG Goal #1. The sessions will also include work that applies the global MPI methodology, the Alkire Foster method, to innovative measures.

The seminars are taking place online on Mondays at 11 a.m. ET. They are open to everyone focused on improving the lived experience of those who are deprived.

Methodological Approaches on How to Measure Risk of Poverty with Income and Wealth

February 6, 2023April 4, 2023Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Past Events, Ultra Poverty

March 1st, Wednesday 2023

Zoom and In-Person

Speaker:

LIS Data Centre

Multidimensional Poverty Dynamics in Indonesia in the time of COVID-19: Lessons Learned and Policy Implications

February 6, 2023April 4, 2023COVID-19, Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Global Governance, Past Events

March 8th, Wednesday 2023
via Zoom and in person

It has long been recognised that poverty encompasses multiple aspects of wellbeing,thus, to truly measure it, a multidimensional tool is needed. This need has become further apparent as the impacts of COVID-19 continue to unfold and disrupt different areas of life, which include, among others, challenges in health, access to learning and the learning gap, alongside significant reductions in standards of living. This paper aims to examine multidimensional poverty trends during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia, utilising a measure that is based on the Alkire-Foster (AF) method. To build this measure, data on household indicators available within the 2019, 2020 and 2021 Susenas waves, will be used. By utilising household information before and during the pandemic, this paper will analyse whether COVID-19 has led to significant increases in multidimensional poverty and to the emergence of the “new poor”. This paper also seeks to present an analysis of differences before and after the pandemic, with regard to the determinants of multidimensional poverty, thus pin-pointing household characteristics, which contribute the most to the experience of poverty. Finally, the findings of this paper aim to act as a robust evidence-base to guide the implementation of poverty alleviation policies in Indonesia during the pandemic.

Speaker:

Putu Natih supports the OPHI Outreach team and is also a lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Indonesia (FEB UI), where she teaches Econometrics for undergraduate and postgraduate students. Putu is also currently supporting Indonesia’s Coordinating Ministry for Human Development and Culture, as a social protection specialist. Before OPHI and FEB UI, Putu was a Statistics Tutor at Keble and St John’s Colleges at the University of Oxford. She also worked as a Research Assistant at the Blavatnik School of Government within a project on digital inequality. Putu completed her undergraduate degree at the Faculty of Economics, Universitas Indonesia and was a Jardine-Oxford Scholar at Trinity College, the University of Oxford, where she studied for her MPhil and DPhil.

Discussant:

Dr Elan Satriawan is an Economist with significant experience in both academic and policy making areas. In academics, he has done extensive research covering topics in development microeconomics areas particularly in impact evaluation and effectiveness of anti-poverty and social programs, poverty related issues including health, education and inter-linkages between the two involving frontiers empirical techniques including randomised experiments. In policy areas, he leads a high-profile government policy think tank to advise the Vice President in taking strategic policy decisions on poverty alleviation and social development. He has extensive knowledge in conducting monitoring and evaluation as well as using the knowledge generated from the research for policy advocacy, capacity building and knowledge management

Nigeria National Multidimensional Poverty Index

February 6, 2023April 4, 2023Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Past Events

February 1st, Wednesday 2023

Zoom and In-Person

Speaker:

Sola Afolayan works at The Presidency, and is the National Coordinator of the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) project, in Nigeria. The MPI; a poverty measurement and policy tool, is an intervention under the Nigerian Government’s National Poverty Reduction with Growth Strategy (NPRGS), which is used in complement with monetary poverty measurement, to understand the country’s poverty dynamics.In the last 22 years, Sola has led teams and held leadership positions across 23 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. At these roles, she sought to shape policy discourses in poverty reduction, social protection, budget performance, infrastructure financing, rural electrification, gender related issues, and in deploying public-private partnerships to address conflicts in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.She describes her career highlight as the recent launch of the Nigeria MPI report by the President of Nigeria, and also in 2015 when she helped set up the framework for a GBP 37 Million programme, where 186kWp solar Photovoltaic (PV) systems each were installed at 11 Clinics and 172 public schools in rural and per-urban areas of Lagos State; resulting in positive health and education outcomes, with over 140,000 homes being solar powered.

Multidimensional Poverty in Europe. A Longitudinal Perspective

February 6, 2023April 4, 2023Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Past Events

February 22th, Wednesday 2023
Zoom and In-Person

Most analyses of multidimensional poverty use cross-sectional data. Consequently very little is known about multidimensional poverty dynamics at the micro-level. This paper uses panel data of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) for 19 countries over 2016–2020 to analyse a multidimensional poverty index broadly consistent with previous work using the same data. Technically, I build on previous research proposing analyses of transitions in multidimensional poverty and its deprivations to illuminate processes which result in deprivations to accumulate. Specifically, I test whether (multidimensional) poor people are (i) more likely to enter a new deprivation and (ii) less likely to leave an already experienced deprivation than comparable non-poor. I show that both hypotheses can be explored in a single model per deprivation and argue that estimating a linear model is sufficient for this purpose. I suggest and illustrate that differences or ratios of the respective conditional probabilities may be computed on an annual basis. The presented evidence lends support to both hypotheses, although I also find cross-country heterogeneity. The proposed analysis is applicable to rotating and short-run panels and is not limited to the analysis of multidimensional poverty. Moreover, routinely computations of the proposed measures may provide timely information for policy makers.

Speaker:

Nicolai Suppa is a Research Associate at OPHI and a Juan de la Cierva Research Fellow at the Centre for Demographic Studies in Barcelona. At OPHI, he works on several research projects. Since 2018, he also co-leads the estimation of the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (global MPI), together with Usha Kanagaratnam and Sabina Alkire.

Cumulative deprivations in the labour market

February 6, 2023April 4, 2023Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Global Governance, Past Events

February 15th, Wednesday 2023
Zoom and In-Person

As the topic of job quality is garnering more attention in both the academic and policy making literature, calls for standardised measures of the concept are gaining increasing traction. However, prevailing measures based on dashboards of complex lists of indicators are difficult to interpret, especially across countries. More recently, the World Bank has published a working paper on “Global Job Quality” that measures multidimensional deprivations across 40 developing countries and is based on a methodology developed by Sehnbruch et al. (2020) and the Alkire/Foster method (2011). Initial studies suggest that the results from existing cross country, time series and dynamic studies are robust and very relevant to policy making. In particular, traditional ways of viewing the labour market in terms of formal (good jobs) versus informal (bad jobs) are outdated as modern hiring and employment practices as well as a shift towards the gig economy have eroded the stability and security of employment. As a result, this makes it difficult for developing countries to establish or sustain social insurance systems.

In advanced economies, employment practices that erode the conditions associated with traditional employment relationships are likely to have a similar impact on the sustainability of existing welfare states, as governments increasingly have to provide workers with additional income support as well as with other services that cover the cost of the multiple negative externalities associated with poor job quality (such as a higher likelihood of suffering from mental and physical health problems). A first step towards measuring these outcomes is therefore to establish a measure of cumulative deprivations in the labour market in the context of advanced economies.

This paper therefore presents the first multidimensional index of cumulative employment deprivations in Europe using data from the European Working Conditions Survey. Using the Alkire/Foster method, variables relevant to the employment relationship are grouped into three dimensions (income, job security and working conditions). Results confirm findings found across developing countries where job quality deprivations are not necessarily related to GDP per capita levels or employment rates. Instead, the regulatory environment of a particular country is the most important determinant of outcomes.

Speakers:

Kirsten Sehnbruch is a Global Professor of the British Academy and a Distinguished Policy Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Previously, she was a Research Fellow at the Universidad de Chile, and a Senior Lecturer at the University of California, at Berkeley.

During 2019, Kirsten was awarded a British Academy Professorship to study the conceptualization and the measurement of the quality of employment in developing countries from the perspective of the capability approach. Her work informs social, labour and development policy more broadly as it allows for resources to be targeted at the most vulnerable workers in a labour market. She has collaborated with governments, international development institutions and NGOs in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Her work has been published by multiple journals such as World Development, The Cambridge Journal of Economics, Development and Change, Regional Studies and Social Indicators Review.

Prior to becoming an academic, Kirsten worked as an equity analyst at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, London. She received her MA, MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge.

Mauricio Apablaza is director of research at the School of Government at the Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile, research associate of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at Oxford University and Visiting Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Mauricio is also the director of the programme Conocimiento e Investigación en Personas Mayores (CIPEM) and president of the Chilean Commission for Quality of Employment and former member of the Chilean commission of experts on informal labour. Previously, he worked as Research Officer and Outreach Coordinator at OPHI, at the University of Oxford. Mauricio holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Nottingham and a postdoc at the University of Oxford. His research areas and publications focus on institutions, multidimensionality, and poverty dynamics.

Discussant:

Josefin Pasanen works as a Research & Partnerships Specialist at the UNDP Human Development Report Office (HDRO). Prior to joining HDRO, she was head of Capacity Building at the Latin America & Caribbean Office of Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL LAC), where she led a team that supported government, NGO, and private sector partners across the region to develop capacities for evidence-based policymaking, research, monitoring and evaluation. She is a development economist by training and holds an MSc In Local Economic Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a BSc in Economics and Political Science from Uppsala University. Josefin’s previous experience also includes research at the Swedish Agency for Public Management and the Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, and policy advisory for the Mayor ́s office at the City of Stockholm.

Measuring Multidimensional Poverty. A Global Assessment of Data Availability and Data Gaps

November 7, 2022November 28, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Global Economic Governance Events, Past Events

Monday, November 7th, 2022

Timely and disaggregated data are essential for effective policy-making, and achieving the ambitious goals outlined in Agenda 2030. To this date, over 30 countries launched national Multidimensional Poverty Indices (MPIs) to monitor SDG 1.2.2 and eradicate poverty in all its forms. In addition, figures on acute multidimensional poverty in over 100 developing countries are published regularly using the internationally comparable global Multidimensional Poverty Index. But there is a need to measure less acute forms of poverty, as well as to cover high income countries.

While advancements have been made on using administrative or census data for measuring multidimensional poverty, most national MPIs and the global MPI relies on household survey data for a comprehensive and timely assessment of poverty, and its changes over time. This presentation reviews the current data landscape with a focus on national and cross-national multi-topic household surveys that might be used to develop a genuinely global multidimensional index covering less acute forms of poverty. It presents a comprehensive and detailed overview of the available resources and identifies important gaps in existing survey data. In addition, the presentation assess the feasibility of a new global moderate multidimensional poverty index with expanded indicator coverage and the inclusion of developed countries, while retaining frequent updates and sub-national dis-aggregation. The presentation proposes multiple options for a global ‘moderate MPI’ and evaluates each according to a set of common criteria. It also proposes a set of measures that could be developed exclusively for high-income countries. Last, the presentation will propose a set of recommendations for improving the availability and coverage of nationally representative household survey data – an essential resource for measuring poverty in all its dimensions, and achieving the overall goal of no poverty.

Speaker:

Fanni Kovesdi (Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, Department of International Development, University of Oxford)

Since joining the OPHI in 2018, she has worked on the global Multidimensional Poverty Index and Changes over Time projects, harmonizing global MPI data to analyze trends in poverty for 80 countries. Prior to joining OPHI, she worked on an ESRC-funded research project on dual career couple trajectories and has completed internships at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Child Hub for Southeast Europe. Kovesdi received her Bachelors of Science in Politics and Sociology from the University of Bristol and her Masters of Science in Sociology from the University of Oxford. Her primary research interests are inequality, poverty, wellbeing, social identities, and migration.

Discussant:

Dean Jolliffe (Lead Economist in the Development Data Group, World Bank)

A Lead Economist at the World Bank and was previously co-director of the 2021 World Development Report on Data for Better Lives. He’s a member of the Global Poverty & Inequality team and the Living Standards and Measurement Study team. Dean currently holds appointments at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, the Institute for the Study of Labor, and the Global Labor Organization. He received his PhD in Economics from Princeton University.

About The series:

The seminars are taking place online on Mondays at 11 a.m. ET. They are open to everyone focused on improving the lived experience of those who are deprived.

Watch More From This Series

Unidimensional Underpinnings of Multidimensional Counting Measures

October 31, 2022November 16, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Past Events

Monday, 31st October, 2022

Zoom and In-Person

We were pleased to invite you to a joint virtual event with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report Office (HDRO) on Monday, October 31st, 2022. This seminar featured speaker James Foster (George Washington University) discussing “Unidimensional Underpinnings of Multidimensional Counting Measures.“

The multidimensional poverty index (MPI) and other counting measures identify and evaluate poverty based on the multiple deprivations experienced by people. Traditional unidimensional measures gauge poverty in a distribution of income (or another variable) using shortfalls from a poverty line. This paper provides an intuitive procedure for transforming unidimensional poverty measures into multidimensional poverty measures by applying a unidimensional measure to an attainment count distribution given a poverty line. The resulting multidimensional measures satisfy ordinality by construction. Other multidimensional properties are assured by their single dimensional counterparts, with the exception of dimensional breakdown which is central to multidimensional poverty but has no unidimensional analogue. Instead, this property is obtained by using an augmented poverty gap or the weight average of the first two FGT measures, which through the transformation generates the MPI.

Speakers:

The many forms of poverty: Analyses of deprivation interlinkages in the developing world

October 24, 2022November 18, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Past Events

Monday, 24th October, 2022

It is widely acknowledged that for efficient progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) their interlinkages have to be taken into account. The global Multidimensional Poverty Index is based on ten deprivations indicators each of which is aligned with specific SDGs. The overlap of these deprivations already figures prominently in the way poverty is measured, i.e. as multiple deprivation. In this paper we complement previous analyses with a novel account to explore how exactly deprivations are interlinked and how these interconnections vary across the developing world. More specifically, we suggest analyzing deprivation within our measurement framework using profiles, bundles, and co-deprivations which each illuminate particular aspects of the joint distribution of deprivations. Additionally, we also apply latent class analysis to corroborate our findings. We use data for 111 countries representing 6.1 billion people to document key patterns at the global level and selected findings for world regions and countries, which may serve as benchmark for more detailed analyses.We also discuss how our approach may (i) be adopted to different settings and (ii) inform multi-sectoral policy programmes.

Speakers:

Ricardo Nogales (Universidad Privada de Bolivia and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, University of Oxford)

Nicolai Suppa (Centre for Demographic Studies, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, University of Oxford)

About The Series:

The seminars are taking place online on Mondays at 11 a.m. ET. They are open to everyone focused on improving the lived experience of those who are deprived.

Measuring Vulnerability to Multidimensional Poverty with Bayesian Network Classifiers

February 26, 2022April 10, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, Past Events

Monday, March 7th, 2022
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. ET
via Zoom

We were pleased to invite you to a joint virtual event with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Human Development Report Office (HDRO) on March 7, 2022 with panelist remarks from Mauricio Gallardo, Associate Professor of Econometrics and Statistical Methods at Universidad Católica del Norte in Chile.

Bayesian network methods have recently gained great popularity in machine learning literature and applications to model uncertainty in complex phenomena that include relationships between multiple random variables. However, these models are not commonly applied in economics and development studies. Here, we introduce the Bayesian network classifier models to estimate the probability of a person to be welfare deprived in one and multiple dimensions. These probabilities are then used for measuring vulnerability to multidimensional poverty (VMP) in four alternative measurement frameworks. Currently, two of them can be found in the literature, but have been estimated with Probit and Logit models, which are unidimensional strategies. Instead of that, in this study, we follow a multidimensional strategy to solve an estimation problem that is multidimensional in nature. Two new VMP measurement procedures based on Bayesian network classifiers estimates are also introduced in this article. We illustrate the four estimation procedures using the household survey and the census data from Chile 2017. A 5-fold cross-validation exercise verifies a high predictive performance of these Bayesian network classifier models, with the highest accuracy being that of one of the new measurements that we put forward. Our findings reveal that the Bayesian network classifier models offer an adequate alternative to face the policy challenge of measuring vulnerability to multidimensional poverty.

About the Speaker

Mauricio Gallardo is Associate Professor at Universidad Católica del Norte in Chile where he teaches Econometrics and Statistical Methods. He holds a master’s degree in Philosophy from Saint Petersburg State University in Russia, a master’s degree in Economics from Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Argentina. Before entering the academy, he worked for the Statistical Division at the Central Bank of Chile. He has also worked providing technical assistance to international organizations on statistical issues. His research interests are related to poverty, vulnerability, and inequality of opportunities.

About the Discussant

Stefan Sperlich made his diploma in mathematics at the University of Göttingen and holds a PhD in economics from the Humboldt University of Berlin. From 1998 to 2006 he was Professor for statistics at the University Carlos III de Madrid, from 2006 to 2010 chair of econometrics at the University of Göttingen, and is since 2010 professor for statistics and econometrics at the University of Geneva. His research interests are ranging from nonparametric statistics over small area statistics to empirical economics, in particular impact evaluation methods. He has been working since about 15 years as consultant for regional, national and international institutions, participated in development programs like EUROSOCIAL, is cofounder of the research center ‘Poverty, Equity and Growth in Developing Countries’ at the University of Göttingen, and is research fellow at the Center for Evaluation and Development (Mannheim, Germany). He published in various top ranked scientific journals of different fields and was awarded with the Koopmans econometric theory prize (among others).

About the Series

The seminars are taking place online on Mondays at 11 a.m. EST. They will be hosted by IIEP Professor James Foster and are open to everyone focused on improving the lived experience of those who are deprived.

More From This Series

Multidimensional Poverty in Brazil in the Early 21st Century – Evidence from the Demographic Census

February 24, 2022March 16, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Past Events

Monday, February 28th, 2022
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. ET
via Zoom

We were pleased to invite you to a joint virtual event with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Human Development Report Office (HDRO) on February 28, 2022 with panelist remarks from Adriana Stankiewicz Serra, a Research Associate at the Institute of Economics of the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil, and discussant remarks from Iñaki Permanyer, an ICREA Research Professor working at the Center for Demographic Studies (CED) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

The paper examines multidimensional poverty in Brazil in 2000 and 2010, based on the microdata of the Demographic Censuses. Our analysis is disaggregated into five classes of municipalities according to their degree of urbanisation and remoteness, highlighting wide rural–urban inequalities in the levels and dynamics of poverty. We compare estimates of traditional monetary poverty with multidimensional poverty measures based on two methods: (i) the Alkire-Foster counting identification approach; and (ii) the Permanyer two-stage poverty identification approach. The two-stage approach introduces the concepts of complementarity/substitutability within and across poverty dimensions, which enables a more precise identification of the population targeted by anti-poverty policies. All methods highlight substantial progress in poverty alleviation. In absolute terms, the reduction in the incidence of multidimensional poverty was significantly larger in the initially poorest areas—rural and intermediate municipalities, as well as those in the North and North–East regions. Important advances were made in standard of living, especially in the access to electricity, durable consumer goods and private bathrooms in the households in rural and intermediate municipalities. However, remote municipalities remain relatively poorer from any perspective, facing more difficulties in reducing monetary poverty.

About the Speaker

Adriana Stankiewicz Serra is a Research Associate at the Institute of Economics of the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil.

About the Discussant

Iñaki Permanyer, an ICREA Research Professor working at the Center for Demographic Studies (CED) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

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Profiling Gendered Multidimensional Poverty and Inequality in Post-Apartheid South Africa

February 21, 2022March 16, 2022Development Economics, Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Ultra Poverty

Monday, February 21st, 2022
11:00 – 12:15 p.m. ET
via Zoom

We were pleased to invite you to a joint virtual event with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report Office (HDRO) on Monday, February 21st, 2022. This event featured Kehinde Omotoso presenting “Profiling Gendered Multidimensional Poverty and Inequality in Post-Apartheid South Africa” and Jacob Assa as a discussant.

About the Speaker:

Kehinde O. Omotoso holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her research covers a wide range of development issues relating to multidimensional poverty, health, gender, climate change and food security. Her research and policy experience spans over a decade during which she has gained a deep understanding of the microeconomic factors that determine poverty and health inequality in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. She contributes regularly to the policy discourse on multidimensional poverty in the context of sustainable development goals (SDGs). She has presented several research papers in both national and international conferences, seminars and workshops. She has a number of research articles published in reputable journals. She is currently on a post-doctoral research fellowship

About the Discussant:

Jacob Assa is a Strategic Advisor with UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Africa. He began his U.N. career 22 years ago as a statistician and then chief of section (DESA/UNSD), focusing on macroeconomic aggregates and development indicators. In this role he was the chief editor of three flagship statistical publications. More recently Jacob worked as an economist focusing on both the least developed countries (at UN-OHRLLS) and UNDP’s Human Development Report (HDR). At UN-OHRLLS, he co-authored the annual SG’s report as well as the flagship publication – State of the LDCs. At UNDP, Jacob co-authored the two most recent HDRs – Inequality in Human Development (2019) and The next frontier: Human development and the Anthropocene (2020). He also developed UNDP’s proposal for a Multidimensional Vulnerability Index, which the Administrator has referred to as an example of thought leadership. Jacob holds a Ph.D. in Economics (2015) from the New School for Social Research and his doctoral dissertation – The Financialization of GDP: Implications for economic theory and policy – has been published as a book by Routledge. He has published in peer-reviewed journals on inequality and growth, financialization, peacebuilding and development, and the political economy of national accounting, most recently in the journals Ecological Economics and New Political Economy.

About the Series:

Videos from this Series

Extending Multidimensional Poverty Identification: From Additive Weights to Minimal Bundles

February 14, 2022March 19, 2022Development Economics, James Foster, Past Events, Ultra Poverty

Monday, February 14th, 2022
11:00 – 12:15 p.m. ET
via Zoom

We were pleased to invite you to a joint virtual event with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report Office (HDRO) on Monday, February 14th, 2022. This event featured Sam Jones (UNU-WIDER) presenting “Extending Multidimensional Poverty Identification: From Additive Weights to Minimal Bundles.”

In this event, Sam Jones presented his paper which examines how in the popular class of multidimensional poverty measures introduced by Alkire and Foster (2011), a threshold switching function is used to identify who is multidimensionally poor. This paper shows that the weights and cut-off employed in this procedure are generally not unique and that such functions implicitly assume all groups of deprivation indicators of some fixed size are perfect substitutes. To address these limitations, he shows how the identification procedure can be extended to incorporate any type of positive switching function, represented by the set of minimal deprivation bundles that define a unit as poor. Furthermore, the Banzhaf power index, uniquely defined from the same set of minimal bundles, constitutes a natural and robust metric of the relative importance of each indicator, from which the adjusted headcount can be estimated. He demonstrates the merit of this approach using data from Mozambique, including a decomposition of the adjusted headcount using a ‘one from each dimension’ non-threshold function.

About the Speakers:

Sam Jones is a Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER based in Mozambique, on extended leave from his position as an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen. He is a versatile economist with expertise in microeconomic empirical methods, education, labour markets, development finance (including foreign aid) and policy macroeconomics. Sam’s work has been published in leading journals, such as Journal of Development Economics, World Bank Economic Review, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Food Policy, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Economic Inequality, World Development, Journal of Development Studies, African Development Review, and Journal of African Economies. Much of Sam’s academic research has focused on sub-Saharan Africa and he has previously worked extensively in Mozambique, spending over ten years as an advisor in the Ministry of Finance.

About the Discussant:

James 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).

About the Series:

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Distributional Impacts of Cash Transfers on the Multidimensional Poverty of Refugees: The ESSN program in Turkey

November 29, 2021March 16, 2022Development Economics, Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, Past Events

Monday, November 29th, 2021
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. EST
via Zoom

Most evaluation exercises of humanitarian cash transfer programs use traditional metrics of poverty and study average effects of intended outcomes separately. We analyze the impact of the Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) cash program on the multidimensional poverty of refugees in Turkey, using a purpose-build Refugee Multidimensional Poverty Index. We conduct a nuanced causal analysis of the distributional impacts of the ESSN on the incidence and intensity of multidimensional poverty, and decompose effects for separate dimensions of poverty. Results show that the ESSN successfully reached the poor and significantly reduced overall multidimensional poverty among its beneficiaries. Significant reductions are found in the dimensions of food security, living standards and education. Incidence and intensity of poverty are shown to fall across the entire distribution. This supports emerging claims that these types of programs, still relatively new in humanitarian contexts, can be transformative for their beneficiaries to achieve multiple outcomes simultaneously. Reductions in the intensities for more deprived households stand out as a finding that outcome specific evaluations and multidimensional impact evaluations focusing on estimating average treatment effect would have missed, demonstrating the added value of the proposed methodological innovation to focus on the entire distribution of deprivation in this paper. By learning from the largest humanitarian cash program in the world, results provide important lessons for cash programs on multidimensional poverty of refugees elsewhere.

About the Speaker:

Matthew Robson works part-time at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) as a Research Assistant. He has worked on a range of projects since 2014, including: refugee multidimensional poverty indices, mismatches between poverty indexes and changes in poverty over time. He is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of York, working within the Equity in Health Policy (EQUIPOL) research group to develop methods to evaluate the causal impacts of interventions on health inequalities. His research interests also span experimental and behavioural economics, where he focuses on prosocial behaviour and inequality aversion. For more information, see his website: https://mrobson92.com/

About the Discussant:

Josefin Pasanen joined the Human Development Report Office (HDRO) research team in 2020. She brings a background in research, monitoring and evaluation, and capacity building for high-impact policy design. She has a strong interest in translating research into policy innovation. Prior to joining HDRO, Josefin was head of Capacity building at the global research center Poverty Action Lab’s (J-PAL) office for Latin America and the Caribbean, working to strengthen government, NGO and private sector capacities for evidence-based policies and programs across the region. A development economist by training, she holds an MSc in Local Economic Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a BSc in Economics and Political Science from Uppsala University. Her research and policy interests center on data for development, sustainability and social inclusion, poverty alleviation, inequalities, gender and labour markets. Josefin’s previous experience also includes research at the Swedish Agency for Public Management and the Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, and policy advisory for the Mayor ́s office at the City of Stockholm.

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Predicting and Mapping MPI using Geospatial and Combined Disparate Data Sources

November 22, 2021March 16, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Past Events

Monday, November 22nd, 2021
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. EST
via Zoom

View the Presentation Here

Poverty statistics are conventionally compiled using data from household income and expenditure survey or living standards survey. This study examines an alternative approach in estimating poverty by investigating whether readily available geospatial data can accurately predict the spatial distribution of poverty in Thailand. In particular, geospatial data examined in this study include night light intensity, land cover, vegetation index, land surface temperature, built-up areas, and points of interest. The study also compares the predictive performance of various econometric and machine learning methods such as generalized least squares, neural network, random forest, and support vector regression. Results suggest that intensity of night lights and other variables that approximate population density are highly associated with the proportion of an area’s population who are living in poverty. The random forest technique yielded the highest level of prediction accuracy among the methods considered in this study, perhaps due to its capability to fit complex association structures even with small and medium-sized datasets. Moving forward, additional studies are needed to investigate whether the relationships observed here remain stable over time, and therefore, may be used to approximate the prevalence of poverty for years when household surveys on income and expenditures are not conducted, but data on geospatial correlates of poverty are available.

About the Speakers:

Neeti Pokhriyal is a visiting scholar in the Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, where she was employed as a postdoc from 2019-2021 funded by the Institute for Security, Technology and Society. She is interested in modeling scenarios characterized by noisy, uncertain, and high-dimensional data coming from heterogeneous sources, with emphasis on reasoning under uncertainty and quantifying biases. She seeks understanding of problems targeting sustainable human development using knowledge inspired and data-driven computational techniques and is interested in exploring evidence-driven policy planning.

She was awarded a seed grant from the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society, Dartmouth College in 2020 to propose methods that enable frequent evaluations of energy deficit in poorer economies in absence of any official surveys. She has collaborated with the Inter-American Development Bank, DC on studying poverty and inequality for Haiti from satellite imagery and mobile phone data.

Her doctoral work was awarded the Chih Foundation Research Award in 2019, which is a single award of USD 2.5K given for innovative research for the betterment of society at University at Buffalo, State University of New York, from where she completed her Ph.D in Computer Science at the Center for Unified Biometrics. During her Ph.D, she led a project funded by Gates Foundation for mapping multi-dimensional poverty using mobile data and has teamed with the National Statistics Office of Senegal and Sonatel. She has also collaborated with the Oversees Development Institute (ODI), London, and Datapop Alliance regarding poverty mapping work in Senegal.

Prior to Ph.D, she was a researcher in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and obtained here Masters in Computer Science from University of California, Riverside, where she received the Dean’s Distinguished Fellowship. She also has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering with honors.

Nattapong Puttanapong is a professor and economist in profession. He is presently an Assistant Professor at Thammasat University and the senior economist at the research institute of Thailand’s Ministry of Finance. He has also worked as a consultant to various government agencies and international organizations such as OECD, ILO, World Bank, ADB and JICA. He was awarded with the Royal Thai Government Scholarship, through which he obtained his Ph.D. in Regional Economics from Cornell University. Dr. Puttanapong’s research interests are in the areas of economic modelling, spatial econometrics, and socioeconomic disparities.

Damien Jacques is the lead data scientist of Rubyx, a company designing risk and profit optimization solutions for banking institutions in emerging countries. He has led projects across the globe requiring (i) designing and implementing algorithms to extract key insights from large unstructured data, (ii) develop strategies to leverage the entire data value chain of companies and development agencies; and (iii) successfully scale up data solutions in complex and multi-stakeholder ecosystem. Damien has extensive expertise in the use of non-traditional data for poverty monitoring and has contributed to the following projects:

– Combining cell phone and satellite image data for improved multidimensional poverty monitoring in Senegal. The results have been published in PNAS (University of Buffalo, Orange).

– Tracking a socio-economic crisis in central America and its impact on poverty using a series of indicators generated from the mobile phone activity of users in the country before and after the crisis (Inter-American Development Bank).

– Estimate poverty at the individual level using mobile phone data in Uganda in order to target the poorest with cash transfers (Dalberg Data Insights, GiveDirectly).

– He also co-organized the poverty mapping initiative with the World Bank and the Qatar Computing Institute.The goal of the workshop was to share knowledge and make plans to better combine traditional development data (such as household surveys, labor force surveys and censuses) with complementary sources of big data (satellite, mobile phones, social media) towards achieving more accurate, timely and cost-effective measures of poverty. See blog Making a better Poverty Map.

Damien holds a Ph.D. in Bioengineering and Agronomy from the catholic University of Louvain.

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On Track or Not? Projecting the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index

November 7, 2021March 16, 2022Development Economics, Global Governance, Past Events

Monday, November 15th, 2021
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. EST
via Zoom

This was the fifth 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. Nicolai Suppa (Research Associate, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford & Researcher, Centre for Demographic Studies (CED), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) presented a paper and Doug Gollin (Professor of Development Economics, Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford) discussed.

About the Speaker:

Nicolai Suppa is currently postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Demographic Studies in Barcelona and Research Associate with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in economics from TU Dortmund in Germany, where he also studied economics and sociology. After his Phd he worked in the research project “Multidimensional Poverty Measurement in Germany and the European Union” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). His research interests are best described as applied welfare economics, including multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis, research on subjective well-being, the capability approach, labour economics, and applied econometrics.

About the Discussant:

Doug Gollin is Professor of Development Economics at Oxford University, based in the Oxford Department of International Development. His research focuses broadly on economic development and growth, with an emphasis on the structural transformations that accompany the growth process. He has particular interests in agricultural productivity and technology, from a micro scale to macro scale. His work has also looked at rural-urban mobility and urbanization processes, spatial patterns of development and a range of other topics.

Professor Gollin joined Oxford in October 2012 after spending sixteen years on the faculty of Williams College in the United States. He currently serves as Research Director for a major global program of academic research on Structural Transformation and Economic Growth (STEG), funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office. Professor Gollin is a managing editor of the Journal of African Economies. From 2012-17, he chaired the Standing Panel on Impact Assessment (SPIA) of the CGIAR and served on the CGIAR Independent Science and Partnership Council. He has also served on the Research Advisory Group for the former UK Department for International Development (DFID).

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Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021 Unmasking Disparities: Ethnicity, Race, and Gender

October 10, 2021March 16, 2022Development Economics, Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Past Events

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.

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Social Protection and Multidimensional Poverty

September 10, 2021March 18, 2022Development Economics, Past Events

Monday, November 8th, 2021
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. EDT
via Zoom

This was the fourth 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. Liyousew Borga (Postdoctoral Research Associate, Universite du Luxembourg) presented a paper and Catherine Porter (Director, Young Lives, Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford) discussed.

Abstract: We investigate the impact of three large-scale social-protection schemes in Ethiopia, India, and Peru on multidimensional poverty. Using data from the Young Lives cohort study, we show the trend, changes and evolution of multidimensional poverty for individuals in program participant households. We follow a number of strategies to produce estimates that deal with non-random program placement. Our findings show that both the incidence and intensity of multidimensional poverty declined in all three countries over the period 2006–2016, more so for program participants than non-participants. We find positive short-term impact on asset formation, livestock holding, and some living standard indicators. In all three countries these positive impacts are sustained even in the medium and longer-term.

About the Presenter:

Liyousew Borga is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Luxembourg. Before that, he was a Junior Researcher at CERGE-EI (Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education – Economics Institute) in Prague, Czech Republic, where he did his PhD. His research interest lies in applied econometrics, mainly labor and development economics. He is particularly interested in the early origins and evolution of health and human capital; the role of intrahousehold resource allocation, and the measurement of poverty and vulnerability. The aim is to understand the mechanisms through which effective policy interventions and optimal choices of investment can help mitigate inequalities and promote health and human capital development.

About the Discussant:

Catherine Porter is the Director of Young Lives and a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Economics, Lancaster University, UK. Her research interests are in applied microeconomics, often using panel or longitudinal datasets. Her focus is on the impact of unexpected events (shocks) on various outcomes such as nutrition, education and parental investments, how inequality develops through childhood into adolescence and early adulthood, and the effectiveness of policy in remediating such inequalities.

The Use of Multidimensional Poverty and Vulnerability Indices in the Context of Health Emergencies

April 20, 2021March 18, 2022Development Economics, Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Global Governance, Past Events

Monday, May 24, 2021
10 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. EDT
via Zoom

Health emergencies pose serious threats to human lives and livelihoods. They also risk exacerbating disadvantages by unequally affecting those who are already worse-off. Identifying how different population subgroups are unequally exposed, susceptible, or vulnerable to diseases, due to social, environmental, and economic implications of health emergencies is vital in developing equitable preparedness, response and recovery measures.

WHO and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) have been collaborating to explore how the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (global MPI) and national multidimensional poverty and vulnerability indices (MPIs or MVIs) could be used in health emergencies, especially in the face of COVID-19 pandemic and its socio-economic consequences. This talk provides a brief overview of how MPIs and MVIs can be used in health emergencies to prevent or mitigate the impacts and to prevent exacerbation of pre-existing inequalities and deprivation. It presents four ways of using multidimensional measures in health emergency contexts, drawing examples from recent studies.

The use of multidimensional measures in the context of health emergencies is new, which invites further discussion, study and exploration by wider stakeholder groups.

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

Meet the Presenter:

Dr Niluka Wijekoon is a medical epidemiologist. She works in the Emergencies Programme at WHO headquarters in Geneva, in the Department of Health Information Management and Risk Assessment.

Dr Niluka is a technical expert in surveillance, early warning, alert and response in emergency settings. She has started her public health career with the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) as the Emergency Health Coordinator in Sri Lanka, during the ethnic crisis. She has first joined WHO in 2011 as the Officer in Charge (OIC) of WHO’s emergency hub in Vavuniya, Sri Lanka. She has been with WHO headquarters since 2014 and has worked in emergencies and outbreaks around the world, including in Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Sierra Leon, Guinea, Nigeria, South Sudan, Mozambique, Rohingya crisis is Bangladesh, NE Syria, Yemen, DRC, and Indonesia. Dr Niluka also manages WHO’s electronic tool for early warning, alert and response named EWARS-in-a-Box, an innovative solution for outbreak detection in emergency settings.

Before embarking on a public health career, Dr Niluka worked as an emergency physician in both public and private healthcare sectors. She obtained her Master of Public Health from The University of Sheffield, UK and Master of Biostatistics and Epidemiology from French School of Public Health, Paris, France (École des hautes études en santé publique).

Dr Niluka has been a human rights and gender champion from the onset of her career. She is the Gender, Equity and Human Rights (GER) focal person for her department at WHO and also an active member of the team which leads the research brief on using multidimensional poverty and vulnerability indices to inform equitable policies and interventions in preparedness for, response to and recovery from health emergencies.

Meet the Discussant:

Juan Daniel Oviedo was appointed Chief Statistician of Colombia in August 2018. He has international professional experience in economic consulting for energy markets, and national experience in government and teaching. Previously, he was the Director of Institutional Planning and Research (2016-2018) and Director of the PhD School of Economics (2013-2016) at the Universidad del Rosario of Bogotá. In addition, he was the Founding Partner and Chief Director of LEICO Consultores (2011-2018), a leading consulting firm which performed as an expert opinion both for the private and public sector in regulated industries in Colombia and Latin America. He holds a permanent academic position at Universidad del Rosario of Bogotá (Colombia) since 2005. Juan has a PhD in economics from the University of Toulouse 1 (France) and BA in economics from the Universidad del Rosario of Bogotá (Colombia).

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Disaggregating the Global MPI by Ethnicity

April 19, 2021April 13, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, James Foster, Past Events

Monday, May 17, 2021
10 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. EDT
via Zoom

Alkire and Kovesdi discussed how the painful topic of race relations, discrimination, and disparities across ethnic groups are in the public eye. Far earlier, Amartya Sen drew attention to the disparity in life expectancies between Costa Rica, Kerala India, and African-American men. Can we study ethnic inequalities quantitatively at a larger scale? This presentation disaggregates the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) by ethnicity for 24 countries and 650 million people, using the recognized ethnic groups for which data were representative. Striking disparities are visible – ranging from pockets of poverty among groups such as the Roma, to yawning gaps between the average poverty levels. This paper illustrates the methodology – and the importance – of disaggregating global poverty measures by ethnic groups.

Jiménez discussed how part of the historic and ambitious nature of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is its pledge to leave no one behind, including a specific goal to reduce inequality between and within countries. This move beyond national averages to look at the unequal distribution of resources, opportunities and voice within countries includes the target to empower and promote the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status.

This presentation provided an overview of how the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) has operationalized the pledge to “leave no one behind,” with a specific focus on trends in inequality by race and ethnicity. It is based on the OPHI Briefing on global MPI ethnicity disaggregations.

Meet the Presenter:

Maren Jiménez is a Social Affairs Officer in the United Nation’s Department for Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). At DESA, Ms. Jiménez forms part of the writing team of the World Social Report (previously the Report on the World Social Situation), the United Nation’s flagship publication on social development issues. Prior to joining DESA, Ms. Jiménez held several positions at United Nations’ regional commissions in Addis Ababa, Bangkok and Santiago de Chile. Ms. Jiménez holds a M.A. in Sociology from The University of Texas at Austin.

Sabina Alkire 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.

Fanni Kovesdi is a Research Analystat the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), where she is supporting research focused on the global MPI, moderate poverty and wellbeing, and technical work with national governments. Prior to joining OPHI, she has worked on research projects at the University of Oxford, the Centre for Social Sciences at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the regional office of Terre des Hommes in Central and South East Europe. Previously, she worked on the “Changes over Time” project which harmonized global MPI data across 80 countries to analyze trends in poverty. She has also supported previous releases of the global MPI through data work and report writing along with leading the ethnicity disaggregation of the measure in 2019. Kovesdi holds a bachelor’s degree in Politics and Sociology from the University of Bristol, and a Master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Oxford. Her primary research interests are in multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis, wellbeing, and ethnicity and migration, particularly in the European context.

Meet the Discussant:

Rachel M. Gisselquist, a political scientist, is a Senior Research Fellow with the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) and a member of the institute’s senior management team. She works on the politics of developing countries, with particular attention to inequality, ethnic politics, statebuilding and governance and the role of aid therein, democracy and democratization, and sub-Saharan African politics. At UNU-WIDER, she currently leads the projects Addressing Group-based Inequalities and The State and Statebuilding in the Global South – International and Local Interactions, and co-leads the projects The Impact of Inequality on Growth, Human Development, and Governance @EQUAL, Clientelist Politics and Economic Development – Theories, Perspectives, and New Directions, and Effects of Swedish and International Democracy Support. She serves as Helsinki-based research focal point for the Southern Africa – Towards Inclusive Economic Development (SA-TIED) programme, and is a core member of the UNU-WIDER team in the African Cities Research Consortium. Under the institute’s previous research programmes, she was a focal point for The Politics of Group-Based Inequalities: Measurement, Implications, and Possibilities for Change (2014–18), and the Governance and Fragility theme of the Research and Communication on Foreign Aid (ReCom) programme (2011–13). Her work is published in various journals and edited volumes, including World Development, Journal of Development Studies, Oxford Development Studies, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Indicators Research, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Democratization, and International Peacekeeping. She is editor/co-editor of a dozen journal special issues and collections, and co-author of the first two editions of the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, which has become a standard reference on governance. Before moving to Helsinki, she spent three years at Harvard University as Research Director, Index of African Governance. She has also spent time at the London School of Economics and with the World Bank. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Master’s degree in Public Policy from Harvard University.

Meet the Moderator:

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 Autonoma del Estado Hidalgo (Mexico).

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A Multi-Country Analysis of Multidimensional Poverty in Contexts of Forced Displacement

April 1, 2021March 18, 2022Development Economics, Past Events, Ultra Poverty

Monday, May 10, 2021
10:00 a.m. EDT

Although forcibly displaced communities face many simultaneous deprivations in their daily lives, in access to education, food security, adequate housing, etc., there is relatively little research on how the multidimensional poverty of these populations differs in both level and composition from that of host communities. This paper presents a multi-country descriptive analysis of multidimensional poverty among forcibly displaced populations and host communities. The paper uses household survey data containing detailed household information and displacement-specific information from Ethiopia, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan to create a Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) that captures the overlapping deprivations experienced by poor individuals and households in these countries. It then uses this MPI to explore relationships between multidimensional poverty, displacement status, and gender of the household head, as well as examining the mismatches and overlaps between MPI and monetary poverty. The results reveal significant differences across displaced and host communities in all countries except Nigeria. In three of the countries (Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan) female-headed households have higher MPIs, while in Somalia, those living in male-headed households are more likely to be identified as multidimensionally poor. They also find mismatches between the proportion of people classified as poor by the MPI and the international $1.90/day monetary poverty line, which verifies the need for complementary measures when assessing deprivations among the forcibly displaced.

Meet the Presenter:

Yeshwas Admasu Bogale is part of the Research Fellow in Forced Displacement program which is supported by the FCDO-UNHCR-WB program on building the evidence on forced displacement. He is working on the Gender Dimensions of Forced Displacement research program. In his current research, he examines the gender differences in access to resources and opportunities for restoring livelihoods among refugees in Ethiopia. His main research interests are in development economics and agricultural economics, with a special focus in applying impact evaluation techniques. He has a PhD in economics from Heriot-Watt University in United Kingdom and MSc in Economics from the University of Copenhagen.

Meet the Discussant:

Anna Gaunt joined UNHCR’s Regional Bureau for East, the Horn and the Great Lakes in January 2020, taking up the role of Senior Livelihoods and Economic Inclusion Officer. She has over 18 years’ experience in the implementation of international donor-funded humanitarian and development programmes focusing on the economic inclusion of vulnerable populations in the Middle East and Africa.

Anna re-established the Economic Inclusion Exchange East Africa and co-chairs the working group together with NRC. The forum includes members of regional INGOs, UN agencies, IFIs, CSOs, and research institutes across the humanitarian-development nexus operating in East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes region. It stimulates discussions, research, and sharing of best practices related to the livelihoods and economic inclusion of refugee, returnees, other persons in displacement and their host communities. It is an open platform for partners to discuss advocating, researching, investing and realizing projects that strengthen self-reliance and resilience, reduce the need of assistance, contribute to economies, increase protection and enhance durable solutions.

About the Event Series

Produced in partnership with the UNDP HDRO, the global MPI 2020 compares acute multidimensional poverty for 107 countries in developing regions and provides a detailed image of who is poor and how they are poor. It offers both a global headline and a fine-grained analysis covering 1,279 sub-national regions, and important disaggregation such as children, and people living in urban or rural areas, together with the indicator deprivations of each group. Bringing together the academic and policy spheres, this series of seminars will highlight topics such as sensitivity analyses, overlapping deprivations, changes over time (poverty trends), and inequality using the global data. The sessions will also include work that applies the global MPI methodology, the Alkire Foster method, to innovative measures.

The seminars are taking place online on Mondays at 10 a.m. EST. They will be hosted by IIEP Co-Director Professor James Foster and are open to everyone focused on improving the lived experience of those who are deprived.

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The Impact of the Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) Program on Multidimensional Poverty of Refugees in Turkey

March 31, 2021March 18, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events

Monday, May 3rd, 2021
10:00 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.
via Zoom

In 2019, the World Food Programme in Turkey designed a multidimensional poverty index (MPI) based on data collected in wave 3 of its Comprehensive Vulnerability Monitoring Exercise (CVME), the CVME MPI. The purpose of the CVME MPI was to support programme targeting, to monitor programme outcomes, and to provide evidence-based recommendations for Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) programmatic adjustments. As part of the meta-analysis of the ESSN programme in Turkey, this talk provides a short review of the multidimensional measure used for the vulnerability analysis and its relationship with the ESSN programme’s targeting approach, and analyses the potential adjustments needed to create a refugee-specific MPI, a so-called Refugee MPI. The talk will further explore how the programme has affected refugees’ lives in areas like employment, fertility decisions, social cohesion, economy at macro and micro level by comparing beneficiaries, non-beneficiaries and host society. The ESSN’s hypothetical impact on non-applicants is also assessed and the study provides results on how multidimensional poverty among refugees would have been if refugees, who did not apply to the ESSN, had applied to receive the assistance.

This event was co-hosted by the University of Oxford.

Meet the Presenter:

Nils Grede assumed the position of World Food Programme Representative (WFP) for Turkey in September 2017. Before arriving to Turkey, he was the Representative in El Salvador. Prior to his current position, Mr. Grede gained experience as WFP Deputy Director in Jakarta, Indonesia (2013-2014). He temporarily served as WFP Interim Deputy Director in Brazzaville, Congo (2013) and WFP Interim Country Director in Mbabane, Swaziland (2012-2013). Before that he was Deputy Chief of Nutrition and HIV/AIDS Policy at WFP’s Headquarters. Prior to joining WFP, he was Director of International Recruitment Marketing at Boston Consulting Group (2008 and 2009) and Principal Director at Boston Consulting Group in Los Angeles, California (2001-2005). Mr. Grede is a German national and is fluent in eight languages: German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew. He is quickly working on improving his Turkish. He holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Islamic and Middle Eastern Sciences received from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Grede has also received an MBA from Stanford University.

Meet the Discussant:

Felix Schmieding is a Senior Statistician with the World Bank – UNHCR Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement. Earlier work includes assignments with UNHCR, UNDP, and the UN Statistics Division. Felix has implemented or provided technical assistance to numerous statistical activities in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean – including living conditions surveys, labour force surveys, population censuses, and administrative registers. He has worked closely with the National Statistical Offices and National Statistical Systems of various countries, building technical and institutional capacity. He has also held key roles in global processes aiming at the development of international statistical standards under the auspices of the UN Statistical Commission. Felix has advised on the analysis of multi-dimensional poverty on various occasions, including for the 2012 population census in Rwanda and a 2018 survey of refugees in Kenya. He holds an M.Sc degree from the University of Oxford.

About the Event Series

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The Policy and Advocacy Use of Multidimensional Poverty Measures

March 27, 2021March 18, 2022Development Economics, Past Events

Monday, April 26, 2021
10:00am EDT
via Zoom

Policy and programme impacts of multidimensional (child) poverty measurement

Multidimensional poverty measures are being used increasingly widely, and indeed included in the Sustainable Development Goals which require countries to reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions by 2030. Despite this increased prominence and adoption of multidimensional poverty measures both at the global and national level – including by UNICEF country offices, there have been few if any comprehensive assessments on the policy and programme use of multidimensional poverty measures.

The talk, and the paper behind it, aims to address this knowledge gap to understand how in practice multidimensional poverty measures – with a focus on child poverty – have been used to guide policy makers and practitioners towards poverty reduction. Accordingly, rather than focus on possible or conceptual pathways of impact, the work intends to review real world examples of how measures have been used to better understand their potential and their limits.

Meet the Presenters:

Sola Engilbertsdottir is a Social Policy Specialist at UNICEF Headquarters in NY and has 14 years of social policy and research experience with UNICEF, with a specific focus on child poverty. She has broad experience working in the East Africa region, in Kenya she supported a decentralized social budgeting initiative and the development of the Kenyan social protection strategy. With UNICEF Rwanda she managed the first ever Rwandan multidimensional child poverty analysis and the evaluations of a child sensitive social protection pilot and an integrated ECD programme. Between 2008 and 2012 Sola provided research and policy advocacy support to over 50 countries participating in a Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities. She currently supervises UNICEF’s child poverty efforts, including support to UNICEF country offices in measuring child poverty and translating child poverty evidence into policy action. Prior to joining UNICEF Sola was a social worker in her native country, Iceland. She holds a degree in Anthropology, as well as a degree in Social Work from the University of Iceland and an MPA from Columbia University.

David Stewart began his career at the Global Human Development Report of UNDP where he spent 6 years working on the Human Development Reports and indices and researched, wrote and presented Reports on Human Rights, Democracy, the Millennium Development Goals, New Technologies, Cultural Freedom and Development Assistance. Between 2005 and 2010 he worked with UNICEF in New York working initially on State of the World’s Children, and subsequently led the organisation’s work on Policy Advocacy. David spent 4 years as Chief of Social Policy and Evaluation for UNICEF Uganda where he has worked on a range of social policy issues including child poverty, social protection, and public finance for children. He is currently the Chief of the Child Poverty and Social Protection Unit for UNICEF in New York, where he works on measurement, technical support to country and regional offices and global advocacy in the areas of social protection and child poverty. Recent work includes “A World Free from Child Poverty” a practitioner’s guide to achieving the SDGs on child poverty, “Making Cash Transfers Work for Children and Families” and he is currently working on universal child grants and developing UNICEF’s updated social protection framework. He co-chairs the Global Coalition to End Child Poverty, and holds a degree in Economics from the University of Sussex and a Masters in Development Economics from the University of Oxford.

Meet the Discussants:

Gonzalo Hernández Licona is Director of the Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network (MPPN), providing strategic direction to the activities of the South-South network of 60 countries and 20 international agencies sharing best practice on how to measure multidimensional poverty.

He was formerly the Executive Secretary of the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL) in Mexico, which is responsible for evaluating social development programmes and carrying out the country’s poverty measurement. Previously, he was Head of Evaluation and Monitoring at the Ministry of Social Development in Mexico.

Between 2017 and 2019 he was the author, together with 14 scientists of the 2019 Global Development Sustainable Report for the United Nations. He was full-time Chair Professor at the Autonomous Institute of Technology of Mexico (ITAM) in the Economy Department from 1991–1992 and 1996–2002. He has taught Development Economics at ITAM since 2003.

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Horizontal and Intersecting Wealth Inequalities in Mozambique – 1997 to 2017

March 27, 2021March 18, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, Past Events

Monday, April 19, 2021
10:00 a.m. EDT
via Zoom

In this seminar of the MPI series, a UNU-WIDER paper was presented.

Presenter: Ricardo Santos is a Research Fellow of the United Nations University World Institute of Development Economics Research – UNU-WIDER, stationed in Maputo, Mozambique, as Technical Advisor to the Centre of Economics and Management Studies at the Faculty of Economics of Eduardo Mondlane University. His doctoral research examined the post-conflict labour market and education sector in Timor-Leste, looking at the medium-run impact of exposure to violence and conflict produce on the households’ choices regarding education. His recent research has focused on the Mozambican labour market, school-to-work transition and on poverty and inequality. His previous work in the development field includes voluntary work for one year in Timor-Leste as a member of a Portuguese NGO and, Program Manager for Timor-Leste and Angola and Deputy Executive Officer of the same NGO.

Abstract: This study seeks to add to the research on inequality in Least Developed Countries, namely in Mozambique, by measuring and mapping indicators of between-group and within-group wealth inequality along geographic and ethnolinguistic identities. Using census data for 1997, 2007 and 2017, we adapt the Multidimensional Poverty Index applied by the Government of Mozambique to build a corresponding Household Wealth Index. We use it to identify possible intersecting inequalities, measuring between-group inequality along joint provincial – urban/rural – ethnolinguistic identities. Additionally, we find heterogeneous evolutions of group inequality between 1997 and 2017 among the country’s eleven provinces.
We find that, while there is a general improvement in the average household wealth indicators, there is a strong suggestion of increasing group inequalities between 1997 and 2017. While this is manifest throughout the country, in general, there is evidence that the Southern provinces may be experiencing a more equitable development. We find evidence that this evolution may be driven by a urban-rural decoupling, added to low internal migration.
These are insights from correlates. No causal inference can be made from this analysis. However, the differences in average wealth between groups, if perceived, may feed grievances. They should be better understood, so that underlying causes can be addressed.

About the Series: The Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP) at George Washington University and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), with the support of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report Office (UNDP HDRO), are pleased to announce new events in our special seminar series on the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (global MPI). Goal 1 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to end poverty in all its forms and dimensions. The global MPI 2020 offers a tool to make progress towards this goal.

The seminars will continue to take place online on Mondays at 10 a.m. EDT. IIEP Co-Director Professor James Foster will host and the events are open to anyone focused on improving the lived experience of those who are deprived.

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Revised Arab Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021

March 26, 2021March 18, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, Past Events

Monday, April 12, 2021
10:00 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.
via Zoom

The session presented the final proposal for the revised Arab Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) framework, as a result of technical work undertaken by ESCWA, OPHI and the League of Arab States (LAS), and consultations with partner organizations. This revised Arab MPI was endorsed during the 40th ministerial session of the LAS Social Ministerial Council on 17 December 2020, as a basis for the forthcoming Arab Poverty Report. The presentation layed out the process leading up to the formal endorsement, the structure of the revised Arab MPI – its two pillars, and their dimensions and individual indicators – and the preliminary estimates of multidimensional poverty in 11 Arab countries using the revised index. The session also presented a brief introduction about the MPI Assist Tool.

Meet the Presenter:

Ms. Sama El Hage Sleiman is a Statistician at ESCWA since 2015. She is also an epidemiologist and an Actuary by training. Previously, she has served as a statistical consultant and a university lecturer for more than 7 years. At ESCWA, her research interest focuses on multidimensional poverty and other composite indicators in the Arab region, such as the regional Economic Justice Index and the Egypt Governorate Competitiveness Index. She participated in the development of the Arab MPI, in its conception and revisions. More recently, she designed a web-based tool for computing MPIs, to be officially launched in July 2021. Currently, Ms. El Hage Sleiman is co-leading the Poverty Project as well as the Future of Work Project at ESCWA.

Meet the Discussant:

Xavier Moncero is an economist from the San Francisco de Quito University and Master in Economics from Georgetown University. Since 2015, he has headed of the Social Statistics Unit of ECLAC Statistics Division, whose areas of work include the measurement and analysis of poverty and income distribution, the compilation and harmonization of household surveys and the production and dissemination of social statistics. He coordinated the update of ECLAC methodology of income poverty measurement and is currently leading the work on a regionally comparable multidimensional poverty index for Latin America. He also serves as coordinator of the Statistical Conference of the Americas.

About the Event Series

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Growth Elasticity of Multidimensional Poverty in India Between 2005/06 and 2015/16

February 25, 2021March 19, 2022Development Economics, India, James Foster, Past Events

Monday, March 8, 2021
10:00am – 11:15am
via WebEx

Post-reform India has generated high economic growth, yet progress in income poverty and many other key development outcomes has remained modest. This paper seeks to explore how inclusive has Indian economic growth been in terms of reducing multidimensional poverty between 2005-06 and 2015-16, employing a constellation of elasticity and semi-elasticity measures – each capturing different forms and components of inclusivity. We assess multidimensional poverty by the well-known Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). A growth elasticity measure captures the percentage change (relative) in a target variable due to a one percent economic growth; whereas, a growth semi-elasticity measure captures the absolute change in a target variable due to a one percent economic growth. Our estimates show that, nationally, a one percent annual economic growth during the study period is associated with 0.0027 units (absolute) or 1.34 percent (relative) annual reduction in the MPI. Our estimates of horizontal inclusiveness, assessed by the change in state MPIs associated with a one percent of national economic growth, show a wide variation across states. For instance, for every one percent national economic growth, the MPI in Bihar falls only by 0.96 percent, but the MPI in Kerala falls by 3.79 percent. Our analyses and application in the paper demonstrate the efficacy of these tools for measuring inclusiveness of economic growth in terms of reducing multidimensional poverty as well as inform policy.

Co-sponsors:
Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI)
UNDP Human Development Report Office

About the Presenter:

Dr. Suman Seth is an associate professor at the Leeds University Business School. He joined the business school in 2015. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) within the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. He obtained a PhD degree in Economics from Vanderbilt University in the USA. After his PhD, he served as a Research Office and as a Senior Research Officer at OPHI between 2010 and 2015. He is primarily interested in Development Economics with a particular emphasis on measurement methodologies and policy-oriented applications. Previously, he has served as consultants to the Regional Bureau of Latin America and the Caribbean, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), to the Development Research Groups at the World Bank, and to the Asian Development Bank.

About the Discussant:

Ajay Chhibber is Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Institute for International Economic Policy, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University and Non-Resident Senior Fellow, the Atlantic Council, Washington DC.

He was the Chief Economic Advisor, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). He was earlier the first Director General (Minister of State) , Independent Evaluation Office, Government of India and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), India – affiliated institute of the Ministry of Finance – where he completed a major study on India’s Public Sector Enterprises.

He held senior positions at the UN as Assistant Secretary General and Assistant Administrator, UNDP and managed their program for Asia and the Pacific. At the World Bank he served as Country Director in Turkey and Vietnam and Division Chief for Indonesia and the Pacific and Lead Economist, West Africa Department. He was also Director of the 1997 World Development Report on the Role of the State. He also worked in the World Bank’s Research Department, as Advisor to the Chief Economist of the World Bank and at the Public Economics Division.

He has a Ph. D from Stanford University, a Masters from the Delhi School of Economics. He also has attended advanced management programs at the Harvard Business School, Harvard University and INSEAD, France. He taught at Georgetown University and at the University of Delhi. He has published widely including 5 books in development economics, and is a contributor (columnist) to several newspapers.

He is now writing a book on “India: A Reset for the 21st Century” under contract with Harper-Collins.

About the Moderators:

About the Event Series

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Inequality among the Multidimensionally Poor in over 100 countries

February 25, 2021March 19, 2022James Foster, Past Events, Ultra Poverty

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.

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

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Analysing Individual Deprivations alongside Household Poverty: Possibilities for Gendered, Intrahousehold, and Multidimensional Analyses

February 8, 2021April 11, 2022Development Economics, Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Past Events

Monday, February 22, 2021
10:00 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.
via Webex

Most poverty measures identify a household as poor or non-poor based on the achievements of all its members. Using the household as the unit of identification enables a poverty measure to draw on information from persons of different ages, genders, and life situations, but loses individual information by summarising it at the level of the household. As a consequence, gendered and intrahousehold inequalities are not illuminated even when data for them exist. However individual indicators or indices lose information regarding the achievements of other household members, and face challenges in finding a structure by which to compare all genders and ages. This paper augments a household multidimensional poverty index (MPI) by applying individual-level analyses to individual indicators in that MPI, and analysing individual deprivations alongside the matrix of deprivations underlying an MPI. Here we focus on individually undernourished and out of school children. Analyses show what proportion of deprived (and poor) children i) live in multidimensionally poor households; ii) are girls vs boys; iii) live in households in which other eligible children are not deprived in that indicator. We also observe iv) what additional deprivations children experience besides the focal deprivation, and v) what proportion of people live in households where children of different ages experience different age-specific deprivations concurrently. Finally using data on completed years of schooling for all adults and children vi) we identify ‘pioneer children’, to illustrate the possibility of combining information on the deprivation or attainment status of more than one household members. This paper provides a prototype methodology that can be incorporated into standard analyses of household poverty measures that include individual indicators in order to shine a light jointly on individual and household poverty. We illustrate each aspect of the methodology with analyses of the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for seven countries in South Asia.

About the Presenter:

Rizwan Ul Haq is a Research Associate at OPHI. He is also Assistant Professor of Development Studies at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics where he is Head of the Department of Development Studies. He has more than 18 years of experience in population and development mainly focusing on poverty, ageing and health. He has worked in the United Nations Development Programme in the preparation of National Human Development Report for Pakistan on Youth.

About the Discussants:

Cheryl Doss is a development economist whose research focuses on issues related to assets, agriculture and gender with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Among her research projects, she co-leads the Gender Asset Gap Project, a large-scale effort to collect data and measure individual asset and wealth holdings for men and women in Ecuador, Ghana, and Karnataka, India. This research examines best practices for collecting individual data on assets and also quantifies women’s ownership of and control over productive assets. Currently, much of her work focuses on how to understand both joint and individual ownership and decision-making within rural households. Cheryl Doss works with a range of international organizations on issues including best approaches for collecting sex-disaggregated data, gender and agriculture, intrahousehold resource allocation, and women’s asset ownership. Currently, she is the gender advisor for the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). In recent years, she has also worked with UN Women, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, DFID, the Africa Development Bank, and the UN Foundation on issues of women’s asset ownership. She has published widely in academic journals in economics, agricultural economics, and development studies.

Jeni Klugman is Managing Director at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and Senior Adviser at the Stanford University Center for Gender Equality. Dr Klugman’s previous positions include fellow at the Kennedy School of Government’s Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard University, Director of Gender and Development at the World Bank, and director and lead author of three global Human Development Reports published by the UNDP. She has published over a dozen books and major global reports, and (co)authored over 70 articles in peer reviewed journals. She regularly participates in major global gender policy initiatives, including the Lancet Series on Gender Equality; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s strategy on women’s economic empowerment; and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Advisory Committee on economic inclusion and global growth. She is currently a member of The Lancet Global Commission on Gender and Health; advising VicHealth, Australia to bring behavioral insights to advance gender equality; UN Women, the World Bank and partners on justice for women; the World Bank on the gender dimensions of forced displacement; and working with the UN Development Program on human mobility. Jeni holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Australian National University and postgraduate degrees in both Law and Development Economics from the University of Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She was included in the Apolitical Inaugural List of the World’s 100 Most Influential People in Gender Policy in 2018 and in 2019.

These seminars are organized jointly with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the UNDP Human Development Report Office. They will he hosted by IIEP Co-Director James Foster.

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Multidimensional Deprivation Index: An Experimental Measure for European Developed Countries

February 3, 2021March 21, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, James Foster

Monday February 15th, 2021

10:00 AM-11:15AM EST

WebEx

In 2010 the Human Development Report introduced the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), a measure based on the counting approach of Alkire and Foster (2011)[i]. The MPI is currently being calculated for over 100 developing countries. However, developed countries were not covered, leaving a false impression that there are no multidimensional deprivations in these countries.

With the universality aspect of the Sustainable Development Goals, the need for a measure of overlapping deprivations for developed countries became important. This paper proposes a new experimental composite index, the Multidimensional Deprivation Index (MDI), aiming at filling this gap by exploring and assessing the simultaneous human deprivations in developed countries. It is based on the same counting approach as the MPI. Similarly, all the indicators needed to construct the MDI must come from the same survey. The experimental MDI proposed here is based on 14 indicators and identifies households and individuals that are acutely deprived in 5 dimensions: education, health, material standard of living, environment and housing, and work.

What is the difference between multidimensional poverty and multidimensional deprivations? Multidimensional poverty refers to individuals lacking multiple basic needs such as access to improved drinking water or improved sanitation facilities. This concept is more appropriate for developing countries. On the other hand, we prefer to use the term multidimensional deprivations to refer to individuals suffering deprivations in aspects that are not basic but that can be no less debilitating to the choices of the individuals and families experiencing the deprivations. Even though a household can have access to improved drinking water and improved sanitation facilities, it can still suffer a deprivation if it cannot keep the home adequately warm or if it cannot pay bills on time. This concept is more appropriate for developed countries. Applying the same methodology to developed and developing countries would give the false impression that there are no multidimensional deprivations in developed countries.

[1] Sabina Alkire and James Foster (2011). Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Measurement.” Journal of Public Economics, 95, 476-487.

About the Presenter:

Cecilia Calderón‘s topics of research include multidimensional poverty, with particular interest in analyzing multidimensional poverty in children, the Human Development Index, inequalities in education and income, and gender inequalities.

Before joining the Human Development Report Office at the United Nations Development Programme, Cecilia has worked at the Population Council, the Inter-American Development Bank and the Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (CEDLAS), Argentina. Cecilia holds a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in Economics from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina. Her Ph.D. dissertation analyses the relationship between the nutritional status of the mothers and its impact of the growth and development of their children.

About the Moderator:

Pedro Conceição has been Director of the Human Development Report Office and lead author of the Human Development Report since 1 January 2019. Prior to this, Pedro served as Director, Strategic Policy, at the Bureau for Policy and Programme Support (from October 2014), and Chief Economist and Head of the Strategic Advisory Unit at the Regional Bureau for Africa (from 1 December 2009). Before that, he was Director of the Office of Development Studies (ODS) from March 2007 to November 2009, and Deputy Director of ODS, from October 2001 to February 2007. His work on financing for development and on global public goods was published by Oxford University Press in books he co-edited (The New Public Finance: Responding to Global Challenges, 2006; Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalization, 2003). He has published on inequality, the economics of innovation and technological change, and development in, amongst other journals, the African Development Review, Review of Development Economics, Eastern Economic Journal, Ecological Economics, Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, Food Policy, and Technological Forecasting and Social Change. He co-edited several books including: Innovation, Competence Building, and Social Cohesion in Europe- Towards a Learning Society (Edward Elgar, 2002) and Knowledge for Inclusive Development (Quorum Books, 2001). Prior to coming to UNDP, he was an Assistant Professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal, teaching and researching on science, technology and innovation policy. He has degrees in Physics from Instituto Superior Técnico and in Economics from the Technical University of Lisbon and a Ph. D. in Public Policy from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied with a Fulbright scholarship.

About the Discussants:

Mauricio Apablaza is the Research Director at the School of Government at Universidad del Desarrollo. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). Previously, he worked as Research Officer and Outreach Coordinator at OPHI, at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom and a Master in Public Policies from the University del Desarrollo (Chile). He has been regional director for civil society organizations and consultant to international businesses and agencies (MEDSTAT/OECD, UNICEF, UNDP, SADC, WORLD BANK). He has led training programs for OPHI in South Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia, Jordan, Egypt, Hungary, Brasil, Chile, the Netherlands, Barbados, US, Vietnam, Nicaragua and Thailand, among others. His areas of research include institutions, poverty dynamics, international migration and commerce.

About the Event Series

The seminars are taking place online on Mondays at 10 a.m. EST, with the final seminar on March 8th, 2021. They will be hosted by IIEP Co-Director Professor James Foster and are open to everyone focused on improving the lived experience of those who are deprived.

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Multidimensional Poverty Indices and Children. Four Measurement Strategies

January 20, 2021March 23, 2022Development Economics, Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Past Events

Monday February 8th, 2021

10:00 AM-11:30AM EST

View Jakob Dirksen and Sabina Alkire’s slides here (PDF)

In order to break intergenerational cycles of poverty and sustainably alleviate deprivations, explicit focus on, and prioritisation of, disadvantaged children is imperative. This all the more so given that children are evidently both among the most vulnerable and oftentimes among the poorest members of societies around the world. In order to effectively focus policy efforts on the alleviation of children’s deprivations and to achieve sustainable poverty eradication, multidimensional measures that can accurately capture the many deprivations experienced by children are thus key. Recognising that child poverty is characterised by age-specific deprivations different from deprivations adults or children of other age groups experience, a rich and growing literature on child multidimensional poverty measurement has emerged. However, experience has shown that, for pro-poor(est) policy-making, such efforts have often resulted in disjoint measurement exercises producing separate statistics of child versus all-population multidimensional poverty. Such disjoint measures have been difficult to communicate and interpret alongside one another – causing confusion that can be disadvantageous in particular for those whose already disadvantaged circumstances they are meant to capture and help improve. Responding to this dilemma, in this presentation we offer four synergetic measurement strategies. These can be used to achieve clear, policy-prescriptive and actionable population-level statistics of multidimensional poverty that focus attention explicitly and directly on children’s deprivations, guiding the prioritisation of those least well-off and at risk of being left behind

About the Presenter:

Jakob Dirksen is part of OPHI’s Research and Outreach teams. He is also a Lecturer at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. He has held research positions at the Blavatnik School of Government and Mansfield College at the University of Oxford, and has worked in diplomacy for the German Foreign Office. Jakob studied Liberal Arts and Sciences, Social Sciences, and Philosophy in Germany and Spain. His research interests are the theory and measurement of well-being, poverty and inequalities; sustainable development; and the capability approach.

About the Discussants:

Ana Vaz is the Director of Research and Technical Validation at SOPHIA Oxford, where she is developing tools for companies to measure multidimensional poverty among their employees and exploring how multidimensional poverty data might support social investment. Before joining SOPHIA Oxford, Ana was a Senior Research Officer at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), University of Oxford. Ana’s work at OPHI focused on the measurement of multidimensional poverty and women’s empowerment. She holds a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford, and she was previously on the faculty at the Catholic University of Portugal and a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

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Moderate internationally comparable MPI

January 15, 2021March 23, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, James Foster, Past Events

Monday February 1st, 2021

10:00 AM-11:30AM EST

Many of the current poverty measures used to track progress towards the Agenda 2030 fall short of its ambition to “end poverty in all its forms, everywhere”. This talk introduces a new measure of “moderate multidimensional poverty” that complements the current measures of acute poverty, in line with the ambitions outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The new trial index, here called Moderate MPI (MMPI), builds on the basic capabilities included in the global Multidimensional Poverty Index but adjusts the indicators to reflect a meaningful change in the level of ambition anchored in the SDGs. MMPI is intended to provide a complementary measure of poverty globally, but will be most meaningful for middle-income countries and regions where acute poverty is already low and possibly no longer reflects a valid level of ambition for national development.

The main value-added of the new trial MMPI is that it: i) is globally comparable across countries at all income levels, ii) aligns the indicators with the higher standards for development as defined in the Agenda 2030, and iii) allows us to study some aspects of intrahousehold deprivation. The trial MMPI is illustrated empirically using nationally representative household surveys from Thailand, Iraq, Tanzania, Serbia, Guatemala, and Bangladesh. While data constrains remain, the results demonstrate that the MMPI is feasible, has desirable properties as a global poverty index, and allows to unearth thus far hidden aspects in poverty measurement, such as intrahousehold deprivations in education. The talk concluded by discussing the steps needed towards a wider policy relevant use of the index that would support the global development community to find sustainable pathways out of poverty

About the Presenter:

Elina Scheja is currently working as a Lead Economist at the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), where her tasks include economic analysis, multidimensional poverty analytics, and advisory support. Her professional interest focus on evidence of what works for poverty reduction, how poverty can be measured in multiple dimensions, and how to promote sustainable and inclusive economic development that benefit people living in poverty. Prior to her current position, Ms Scheja was based in Rwanda managing Sida’s project portfolio for productive employment, analysing economic development, and engaging in dialogue with partners for sustainable poverty reduction. Ms Scheja has long experience in development cooperation in different roles and organisations, such as the World Bank where she worked with inclusive growth, development effectiveness, and migration. Ms Scheja holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex, Masters in Economics from Helsinki School of Economics, and Masters in Development Studies from Helsinki University, and has research experience from several universities and research institutions

About the Discussant:

Iván González de Alba is a Country Economist at UNDP’s Country Office in Cambodia. Until August 2020, he was the Regional Policy Advisor in Poverty Reduction and Sustainable Development at UNDP’s Regional Hub for Latin America and the Caribbean. Economist and holds a Masters in Public Policy from ITAM (Mexico) as well as a Masters in Economics and a DPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, England. Former OPHI collaborator, also worked for the Mexican government holding different positions at the ministries of tourism, social development and urban development. Social protection in Africa and the regional study on environmental variables into MPIs are among his most recent publications.

Khalid Abu-Ismail is a Senior Economist at UN-ESCWA, ERF Policy Affiliate and formerly UNDP Policy Adviser and Faculty Member of the Economics Department of the Lebanese American University.

Over 50 research papers and UN publications with a focus on poverty, inequality and human development in Arab countries, including: “Arab Vision 2030 Report” (ESCWA, 2015), “Arab Middle Class” (ESCWA, 2014), “Rethinking Economic Growth” (ILO and UNDP, 2012), “Arab Multi-Dimensional Poverty Report” (LAS, OPHI, UNICEF and ESCWA, 2017), “Rethinking Inequality in Arab Countries” (ESCWA and ERF, 2019) and lead author of the forthcoming ESCWA report on “Rethinking Human Development”. He has a D. Phil. in Development Economics from the New School for Social Research in New York.

About the Moderator:

These seminars are organized jointly with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the UNDP Human Development Report Office. They will be hosted by IIEP Co-Director James Foster.

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Changes over Time in the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index and Other Measures: Towards National Poverty Reports

January 15, 2021March 23, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, James Foster, Past Events

Monday January 25th, 2021

10:00 AM-11:30AM EST

Paper Description:

This paper provides a highly visual, intuitive yet systematic assessment of trends in the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) over time across 80 countries and five billion people in developing regions. The analysis draws on data from 2000-2019, to document how the MPI, incidence and intensity of poverty has changed in these countries, and what indicators drove that change. Such a systematic review is an essential step towards clarifying the Sustainable Development Goal’s (SDGs) Target 1.2 to halve the proportion of people who are poor in many dimensions, and furthers the call for consistent, high quality, timely, and policy-relevant data on the interlinked deprivations that people living in multidimensional poverty endure.

About the Presenter:

About the Discussants:

Jaya Krishnakumar is a full professor of Econometrics at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She is also a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and Madras School of Economics, Chennai, India. Her research interests include panel data econometrics, multivariate models with latent variables and quantitative methods for multi-dimensional well-being analysis. She has publications in leading international econometrics/economics journals for example in Econometric Theory, Journal of Econometrics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Public Economics, European Economic Review, Health Economics, and World Development. She has also edited and contributed chapters in books in Econometrics and on the Capability Approach. She is a member of the Advisory Panel for the Human Development Reports of the UNDP, and a Fellow of the Human Development and Capabilities Association. She has also been a member of the academic experts panel for World Bank’s Women, Business and The Law Index 2019, as well as an Advisor for the SDG Action Manager launched by B-Lab along with the UN Global Compact in early 2020.

José Manuel is a Research Associate at OPHI, and co-authored Multidimensional Poverty Measurement and Analysis published by the Oxford University Press. He has over 20 years of research and policy experience in international development, human development, poverty and inequality analysis, horizon scanning and strategic foresight, while working for civil society organizations, governments, and academia.

He has held various research and advisory roles for international agencies (including the World Bank, UNDP, UNICEF, ECLAC, Asian Development Bank), international NGOs (Save the Children, Care, Oxfam and World Vision) and national governments (Colombia, Venezuela, Egypt, Chile, Brazil, Indonesia, Bhutan and Malaysia).

He has been a lecturer and taught various undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the University of Oxford, University of Sussex and University College of London.

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Link to the Presentation

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Sensitivity Analyses in Poverty Measurement: The Case of the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index

January 1, 2020March 28, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, James Foster, Past Events

Monday January 18th, 2021

10:00 AM-11:15AM EST

Paper Description:

This paper provides an extensive sensitivity analyses of the global multidimensional poverty index (MPI), a counting-based measure of acute poverty covering over 100 developing countries. Empirically, the paper probes the sensitivity of poverty measures and comparisons to modifications in key parameters. Outcomes studied include the adjusted headcount and headcount ratios and their subnational rankings, as well as the exact set of people who are identified as poor. The parameters that are adjusted include the poverty cutoff, weights or deprivation values, and indicators. Multidimensional poverty measures are generated using 10 alternative poverty cutoffs, 231 alternative weighting schemes, and six alternative indicator selections, in addition to the global MPI baseline specifications. The present paper also suggests ‘second-order’ sensitivity analyses to deepen the understanding of the underlying methods by varying poverty cutoffs and indicators simultaneously.

Broadly speaking, the results suggest that parameter choices can make a difference, which is consistent with the fact that often dominance results may not emerge. Specifically, the evidence suggests that fundamentally different parameters may substantially change the performance of the entire poverty measure or even its very nature (e.g., for a union cutoff or extreme weighting schemes). However, the results also suggest little sensitivity of outcomes when changing parameters within plausible ranges. One implication of these results is that sensitivity analyses in poverty measurement have a central role in the initial process fixing the parameters, in which usually numerous stakeholders participate, including policymakers and experts alike. The reason is that an agreement on a range of values is easier to achieve than on one particular number. An important technical insight is that union-based measures are more sensitive than the base-line measure, e.g., with respect to indicator selections.

About the Presenter:

Nicolai Suppa is currently postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Demographic Studies in Barcelona and Research Associate with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in economics from TU Dortmund in Germany, where he also studied economics and sociology. His research interests are best described as applied welfare economics, including multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis, research on subjective well-being, the capability approach, labour economics, and applied econometrics. Nicolai has published articles in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Social Choice & Welfare, Empirical Economics, and the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities. At OPHI he is co-leading the estimation of the global MPI since 2018 and editing the OPHI Working Paper Series.

About the Discussant:

Monica Pinilla-Roncancio is a Physiotherapist with a Master’s degree in Economics from Universidad del Rosario. She has also a Master’s degree in Health Economics, Policy and Law from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. She finished her PhD in Social Policy at the University of Birmingham, UK. From 2016 to 2018 she was as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidad de los Andes and currently is an Assistant Professor at the same university. She is the Co-director of Metrics and Policy at OPHI and has been working in OPHI since 2014. She coordinates the work in Latin America, East Asia and some countries in Africa and Middle East. Her main research interest are disability, multidimensional poverty, inequality and health economics.

Dr Suman Seth is an associate professor at the Leeds University Business School. He joined the business school in 2015. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) within the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. He obtained a PhD degree in Economics from Vanderbilt University in the USA. After his PhD, he served as a Research Office and as a Senior Research Officer at OPHI between 2010 and 2015. He is primarily interested in Development Economics with a particular emphasis on measurement methodologies and policy-oriented applications. Previously, he has served as consultants to the Regional Bureau of Latin America and the Caribbean, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), to the Development Research Groups at the World Bank, and to the Asian Development Bank.

About the Moderator:

This event and seminar series was jointly organized with the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the UNDP Human Development Report Office. The seminars will be hosted by IIEP Co-Director James Foster.

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