OPHI Summer School 2015

Organised by OPHI and hosted at the Georgetown University in Washington D.C. 3-15 August

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, which drew 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;
• Subgroup decomposition and mapping;
• Multidimensional poverty dynamics;
• Disparity among the poor and across groups;
• Econometric analysis of multidimensional poverty; and
• Institutions, policies, and communication.

OPHI Summer School Materials 2015

Key resources

• Summer school programme and reading lists
• Calculating the MPI in Stata (do-file): Deprivation matrix, decompositions by population subgroup and dimensions and robustness analysis

Pre-Summer School Readings

• ‘The Capability Approach to the Quality of Life’, Sabina Alkire (2008)
• ‘Counting and Multidimensional Poverty’, Sabina Alkire and James Foster (2009)
• ‘Training Material for Producing National Human Development Reports’, Sabina Alkire and Maria Emma Santos (2011)

Presentations and exercises

Day 1	Video	PDF
Why Multidimensional (MD) Poverty Measures?
More Relatively-Poor People in a Less Absolutely-Poor World
Review: Unidimensional Poverty Measurement
Day 2
Case studies: Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)
Alkire Foster Methodology
Multidimensional Poverty Measurement Methodologies and Counting Approaches
Day 3
Introduction to the Capability Approach
National Multidimensional Poverty Measures
Normative Choices in Measurement Design
Day 4
Data Issues in Multidimensional Poverty Measurement
Stata
Day 5
Associations across Deprivations
Day 7
Population Subgroup Decomposition and Dimensional Breakdown
Day 8
Robustness analysis and statistical inference
Multidimensional Poverty Dynamics with Time Series and Panel data
Interpreting Multidimensional Poverty Results
Day 9
Multidimensional Poverty and Distribution: Inequality among the poor and Disparity across regions
Some Regression Models for the Alkire and Foster Method
Communication
Day 10
Targeting and Impact Evaluation
Uses & Institutionalisation of Multidimensional Poverty Measurement