by Professor Amartya Sen
Chaired by the Chancellor of the University, the Rt Hon Lord Patten of Barnes

Brief description: In this recording Jose Manuel Roche, OPHI Research Officer, introduces ‘Beyond Headcount: Measures that Reflect the Breadth and Components of Child Poverty’ a paper, co-authored with Sabina Alkire. His talk presents a new approach to child poverty measurement that reflects the breadth and components of child poverty. The Alkire and Foster method presented in this paper seeks to answer the question ‘who is poor’ by considering the intensity of each child’s poverty. His talk illustrates one way to apply this method to child poverty measurement, using Bangladeshi data from four rounds of the Demographic Health Survey covering the period 1997–2007. He argues that child poverty should not be assessed only according to the incidence of poverty but also by the intensity of deprivations that batter poor children’s lives at the same time.

In this recording Suman Seth, OPHI Research Officer, introduces ‘Determining BPL Status: Some Methodological Improvements’ a paper, co-authored with Sabina Alkire. His talk focuses on the method for identifying Below the Poverty Line households in rural India, and argues that mistargeting is significantly influenced by the
measurement methodology, not only by corruption as has been supposed.

In this recording Gaston Yalonetzky, lecturer at the Leeds University Business School introduces a paper, ‘Conditions for the Most Robust Poverty Comparisons Using the Alkire-Foster Family of Measures’ that extends the dominance results derived by Lasso de la Vega (2009) and Alkire and Foster (2010) for the adjusted headcount ratio in the Alkire- Foster measure and develops a new condition whose fulfillment ensures the robustness of comparisons using the adjusted headcount ratio for any choice of multidimensional cut-off and for any weights and poverty lines. The paper then derives a first-order dominance condition for the whole Alkire-Foster family (that is, for continuous variables).

Professor Jacques Silber | Inequality in Latin America

Podcast of a special seminar ‘On Relative Bi-Polarization and the Middle Class in Latin America’, Professor Jacques Silber will be available 8 June 2012. The seminar will be chaired by Sir Tony Atkinson and is co-hosted by OPHI and the Department of Economics, University of Oxford.

Slides from the presentation can be accessed here.

On Relative Bi-Polarization and the Middle Class in Latin America

A Look at the First Decade of the 21st Century

 Professor Jacques Silber

 Chair: Sir Tony Atkinson

 Jacques Silber is Professor of Economics at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Economic Inequality, and an OPHI Research Fellow. Professor Silber’s new work provides fresh insights into inequality in Latin America, which is sometimes called the most unequal region in the world. The new work looks at socio-economic mobility and the middle class in Latin America (2000–2009), particularly changes in bi-polarization using Latinobarómetro survey data for 15 countries.

Sir Tony Atkinson, Professor of Economics, University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, will chair the seminar.

About the speakers

Professor Silber is a leading specialist in distributional analysis, with contributions in the fields of income inequality and poverty measurement, as well as discrimination and segregation in the labour market. His edited and authored books include:

 •          Handbook on Income Inequality Measurement (with a foreword by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen), 1999;

•          The Measurement of Segregation and Discrimination in the Labor Force (with Y. Flückiger), 1999;

•          The Many Dimensions of Poverty (with Nanak Kakwani), 2007; and

•          Quantitative Approaches to Multidimensional Poverty Measurement (with Nanak Kakwani), 2009.

Professor Atkinson is an advisor to OPHI and has been President of the Royal Economic Society, of the Econometric Society, of the European Economic Association, and of the International Economic Association.

Ask a question

For questions and comments on Professor Silber’s talk use the Twitter hashtag #jsoxford.

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James E. Foster seminar on ‘New Frontiers in Poverty Measurement’

Watch a recording of Professor James E. Foster’s special seminar at the University of Oxford on New Frontiers in Poverty Measurement, April 30.  This special seminar was co-hosted by OPHI and the Department of Economics.

Download lecture slides for this presentation.

James E. Foster is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University and a Research Associate at OPHI. His research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate the well-being of people. His joint 1984 Econometrica paper is one of the most cited papers on poverty. The paper introduced the FGT Index, which has been used in thousands of studies and was the basis for targeting the Progresa/Oportunidades program in Mexico.

Ask a question

Questions and comments on Professor Foster’s talk used the Twitter hashtag #jfoxford. See the conversation below.

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In this recording Nicolas Ruiz, Analyst at the Statistics Directorate at OECD, presents joint work with Peter Lanjouw of the World Bank on Temporal Mapping of Poverty Using Synthetic Panel Data.

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In this recording Suman Seth, OPHI Research Officer, introduces “Sub-national Disparities and Inter-temporal Evolution of Multidimensional Poverty across Developing Countries”, a paper, co-authored with Sabina Alkire and Jose Manuel Roche of Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) results. His talk focuses on new analyses of sub-national decompositions and changes over time for 1.4 billion of the 1.65 billion MPI poor people identified by the MPI in 2011. It analyses the incidence, intensity and composition of multidimensional poverty at sub-national levels for 66 developing countries, and presents poverty estimates for 683 sub-national regions. Finally, he presents analysis of changes over time for ten countries and their 158 sub-national regions for which we have comparable data across two different periods of time, providing information regarding the reduction of each indicator within each region.

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On 7 December, OPHI released new MPI analysis for 2011 at a special policy forum in London, UK. Presentations of the new work by Sabina Alkire, José Manuel Roche and Suman Seth were followed by responses from Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University and Professor James Foster, George Washington University. The panel was chaired by Joanna Macrae of DFID’s Research and Evidence Division, which featured a lively Q&A.

Key findings for the MPI 2011:

• Most MPI poor people live in middle-income countries – as do most ‘severely’ MPI poor people
• 50% of the MPI poor people live in South Asia and 29% in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Income classifications hide wide disparities in MPI poverty: The percentage of MPI poor people in low income countries varies from 5% to 92%; in middle income, from 1-77%.
• MPI varies within countries, sometimes greatly.
• Poverty reduction over time varies by dimension and by region.

A range of resources are available for the MPI 2011 including poverty maps, country briefings, data tables, case studies of people living in MPI poverty, and briefing reports – they can be accessed at: http://www.ophi.org.uk/policy/multidimensional-poverty-index/

In this recording Sabina Alkire introduces “Understandings and Misunderstandings of Multidimensional Poverty Measurement”, a paper, co-authored with James Foster and published in the Journal of Economic Inequality. She elucidates the strengths, limitations, and misunderstandings of multidimensional poverty measurement, along with the paper’s attempts to clarify the debate and catalyse further research.

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The paper is published as part of the OPHI Working Paper series and you can read it here.