‘I live under the roof of falling tiles.' This self-description of poverty, tucked away in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, is by a character called Bossuet, who was, it seems, both merry and unlucky.
Yet ‘he accepted ill-luck serenely, and smiled at the pin-pricks of destiny like a man who is listening to a good joke. He was poor, but his wallet of good-temper was inexhaustible...
When adversity entered his room he bowed to his old acquaintance cordially; he tickled catastrophes in the ribs, and was so familiar with fatality as to call it by a nick-name. These persecutions of fate had rendered him inventive.' (Hugo 2007: ii.136-7).Hugo's delicate portraits render the ‘multidimensionality' of poverty with rather greater colour than economists and statisticians tend to indulge. Yet many of these are converging on a similar assessment. Their characteristically parsimonious description stretches to a mere three words: ‘poverty is multidimensional'. Nonetheless this recognition has far-reaching implications for diverse fields of study that intersect with poverty reduction, including our focal area: poverty measurement.
Poverty is a condition in which people are exposed to multiple disadvantages—actual and potential. In Bossuet's case, the disadvantages encompassed homelessness, landlessness, joblessness, and health catastrophes as well as low income. In other cases violence, humiliation, and poor education contribute. Across many developing countries, the pioneering Voices of the Poor study, completed shortly before the Millennium, conveyed poor people's own vision of their condition, forcefully delineating its multidimensionality:
Poverty consists of many interlocked dimensions. [First,] although poverty is rarely about the lack of one thing, the bottom line is lack of food. Second, poverty has important psychological dimensions such as powerlessness, voicelessness, dependency, shame, and humiliation. Third, poor people lack access to basic infrastructure—roads. transportation, and clean water. Fourth. poor people realize that education offers an escape from poverty..
Fifth, poor health and illness are dreaded almost everywhere as a source of destitution. Finally, the poor people rarely speak of income, but focus instead on managing assets—physical, human, social, and environmental—as a way to cope with their vulnerability. In many areas this vulnerability has a gender dimension. (Narayan et al. 2000: 4-5)One great merit of the Millennium Declaration and specifically the Millennium Development Goals has been to flag the multidimensionality of poverty, so as to incentivize concrete action. A broader view of poverty is also held in Europe, where Nolan and Whelan observed that, ‘It can be argued with some force that the underlying notion of poverty that evokes social concern itself is (and has always been) intrinsically multidimensional' (2011:17). Philosophically, Amartya Sen (2000) observes that ‘human lives are battered and diminished in all kinds of different ways'—a situation Wolff and De-Shalit (2007) call ‘clustered disadvantage. Bossuet's phrase about living ‘under the roof of falling tiles' thus aptly describes multidimensional poverty, whose protagonists know that, in their condition, multiple disadvantages are going to keep striking, although they may not know which problems will strike when, or how.
In consequence, multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis are evolving rapidly. The field is being carried forward by activists and advocates, by political leaders, firms, and international assemblies, and by work across many disciplines, including quantitative social scientists working in both research and policy. As a contribution to this polycephalous endeavour, this book provides a systematic conceptual, theoretical, and methodological introduction to quantitative multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis.
Our focal methodology, the Alkire-Foster (AF) counting approach, is a straightforward multidimensional extension of the 1984 Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) approach, which has had a significant and lasting impact on income poverty measurement.
Although quite recent, this particular methodology for measuring multidimensional poverty has generated some practical interest. For example, estimates of a Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) are published and analysed for over 100 developing countries in the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Reports.[1] Governments of countries that include Mexico, Colombia, Bhutan, and the Philippines use official national multidimensional poverty measures that rely on this methodology,[2] and other regional, national, and subnational measures are in progress.[3] Adaptations of the methodology include the Gross National Happiness Index of the Royal Government of Bhutan (Ura et al. 2012) and the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (Alkire et al. 2013). Academic articles engage, apply, and develop further this methodology as we document in Chapter 5. Thus the book aims to articulate the techniques of multidimensional poverty measurement using the AF methodological approach, and situate these within the wider field of multidimensional poverty analyses, thereby also crystallizing the value-added of an array of alternative approaches.While subsequent chapters are mainly concerned with quite technical matters, the book keeps a window open to policy. For example, it assesses properties of measures alongside their feasibility (given data constraints), communicability, and policy relevance. Indeed it was Atkinson's (2003) call for policy-relevant, analytically specified multidimensional poverty measures that motivate our own and many other works. And this brings us back to Les Miserables one last time.
Hugo's perceptive character sketches did not always step so lightly over poverty's grim despair as the opening quotes suggest. Taken together, his characters were intended to unveil the intricacy of lives affected by misery, to elicit and educate disquiet, and to spur political action. Similarly, while the proximate objective of poverty measurement is rigour and accuracy, an underlying objective must also be to use well-crafted measures to give a different kind of voice to concerns with injustice—to document raw disadvantage, to order complexity, monitor and evaluate advances, and mark routes for tangible policy responses. So without sacrificing rigour, our underlying hope is that as the field of multidimensional poverty measurement advances, both methodologically and practically, it may contribute more effectively to the reduction or eradication of multidimensional poverty.
This chapter presents the motivation for focusing on multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis. Our motivation essentially comes from three sources: normative arguments, empirical evidence, and a policy perspective. We end this chapter by presenting how this book can be used.
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