How Multidimensional Poverty Went Down: Dynamics and Comparisons

This briefing shares an exciting set of insights into how multidimensional poverty changed in 22 countries and 189 subnational regions. The 22 countries come from every geographic region in the developing world. They contain nearly 2 billion people, which is almost 30% of the world’s population.

 

We created rigorously comparable MPI values. Naturally the global MPI is not tailor-made to any national context, so some governments are implementing national MPIs whose indicators, cutoffs and weights reflect their context and policy priorities as well as the voices and visions of the poor. But these comparisons of poverty reduction across 22 countries aid, incentivise, and celebrate the reduction of disadvantages that blight people’s lives. They also demonstrate the value-added that a multidimensional poverty measure such as the MPI can bring: to provide insights into progress by region, indicator, and weighted contributions; to incentivise reductions in intensity among the multiply disadvantaged; and to make visible the successes that income poverty overlooks.

 

Citation: Alkire, S. and Roche, J.M. (2013). 'How multidimensional poverty went down: Dynamics and comparisons', OPHI Briefing 16, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), University of Oxford.