Final Comments on Counting Approaches
Counting approaches emerged as a natural procedure for identifying the poor with the basic needs and the social exclusion approaches, giving form to various direct methods to measure poverty.
Counting the number of observable deprivations in core indicators has an intuitive appeal and simplicity that has attracted not only academics but also policymakers and practitioners. Over time, counting methods have been implemented in a variety of useful formats in terms of poverty measurement—namely, the European Measures of Relative Deprivation, the Consensual Approach to Poverty Measurement, the Consistent Poverty Approach, the Latin American Basic Needs Approach—and they have been incorporated into solid axiomatic poverty measures in the academic literature. Moreover, the counting approach has also been used to measure child poverty and to construct targeting tools for poverty reduction programmes. The counting approach has motivated the collection of new data in some cases, and the construction of powerful policy tools such as poverty maps, in others.It is also worth observing that some prominent approaches look similar to the counting approach yet differ in fundamental ways—such as assigning (by a normative or a statistical procedure) cardinal values to categories of ordinal variables, or using an aggregate line approach—and thus, in the end, are altogether different. This is the case in Boltviniks improved integrated method and Schreiner's poverty scorecard method, among others.
The AF methodology uses a counting approach to identify the poor, and, as a consequence, it inherits its simplicity and intuition and stands on the shoulders of this venerable tradition in both academic and policy circles. Additionally, it introduces axiomatic rigour by (a) scrutinizing the counting approach as an identification method of the multidimensionally poor in a formal framework and (b) combining it with aggregation methodologies, also within a formal axiomatic framework. Chapter 5 will present the AF methodology in depth.