OPHI Summer School 2014

Organised by OPHI and hosted at the University of Oxford’s Department for International Development (ODID)
Oxford University, Oxford, UK ~ 11-23 August 2014

The purpose of this intensive summer school was to provide a thorough conceptual and technical introduction to some techniques of measuring multidimensional poverty with a strong emphasis on the Alkire Foster method. Participants revised axiomatic poverty measures, and learnt about different techniques of multidimensional poverty measurement and which problems they are best suited to solve. The empirical motivation for measuring multidimensional poverty was presented as well as the conceptual motivation, drawing on Amartya Sen’s capability approach.

The following topics were covered:

• Axiomatic approaches to unidimensional and multidimensional poverty;
• Methodologies to analyse multidimensional poverty – dashboard, stochastic dominance, information theory, fuzzy set, multiple correspondence analysis, unmet basic needs and counting approaches – and the problems each methodology best solves;
• The Alkire Foster methodology of multidimensional poverty measurement;
• Selection of parameters – purpose, unit of measure, dimensions, indicators, cut-offs and weights;
• Data reduction techniques for measure design and analysis;
• Subgroup decomposition and mapping;
• Multidimensional poverty dynamics;
• Disparity among the poor and across groups;
• Econometric analysis of multidimensional poverty; and
• Institutions, policies, and communication.

The summer school was led by the Researchers and Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), an economic research centre within the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. OPHI instructors include Sabina Alkire, Mauricio Apablaza, Mihika Chatterjee, Adriana Conconi, John Hammock, Bouba Housseini, Suman Seth and Ana Vaz.