Measuring 'Leaving no one behind': Options from India

When poverty goes down, a natural question is whether the poorest are reducing poverty the fastest. In current terms, are the poorest groups catching up, or being left behind. But at present there is no agreed metric for measuring the normative concept of 'leaving no one behind.' Between 2005/6 and 2019/21, India reduced the global multidimensional poverty index strongly, with 415 million leaving poverty in that time period and with the fastest absolute MPI reduction occurring in the poorer states and social groups. This paper implements and critically assesses a series of different ways of measuring "leaving no one behind" in multidimensional poverty reduction. Techniques explored include disaggregation and comparisons of the average pro-poorness slopes from different disaggregations, including new sub-state disaggregations by district and social groups. The paper looks at and finds first order dominance in the CDF of deprivation scores of the poor in the 2015/16 to 2019/21 period. It also breaks a general strategy for assessing pro-poorness which divides the poor population into distinct subgroups according to their deprivation scores, and compares the relative speed of reduction in the incidence of these groups. Thus empirical  convergence and divergence between alternative measures of leaving no one behind are shared for India. The empirical work is used as a springboard to reflect on how to assess claims of pro-poor changes going forward.

Authors of original paper: Sabina Alkire, Christian Oldiges, Usha Karaganatnam.

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