A Multidimensional Poverty Index for Latin America

This paper proposes a new Multidimensional Poverty Index for Latin America. The index combines monetary and non‐monetary indicators, updates deprivation cut‐offs for certain traditional unsatisfied basic needs indicators and includes some new indicators, aiming to maximize regional comparability wit...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Review of income and wealth 2018-03, Vol.64 (1), p.52-82
Main Authors: Santos, Maria Emma, Villatoro, Pablo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
D31
Deprivation
Economic indicators
Economic theory
I32
Indexes
Latin America
multidimensional poverty
O54
Poverty
poverty measurement
Rural areas
Rural communities
Scrutiny
SDGs
Unsatisfied Basic Needs
Urban areas
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Summary:This paper proposes a new Multidimensional Poverty Index for Latin America. The index combines monetary and non‐monetary indicators, updates deprivation cut‐offs for certain traditional unsatisfied basic needs indicators and includes some new indicators, aiming to maximize regional comparability within the data constraints. The index is estimated for 17 countries of the region at two points in time—one around 2005 and the other around 2012. Overall, we estimate about 28 percent of people are multidimensionally poor in 2012 in the region. We find statistically significant reductions of poverty in most countries, both in terms of incidence and intensity over the period under analysis. However, important disparities between rural and urban areas remain. Statistical scrutiny of the index suggests that it captures the state of poverty relatively well while maintaining a certain parsimony and being highly robust to changes in weights, indicators, and poverty cut‐off.
ISSN:0034-6586
1475-4991
DOI:10.1111/roiw.12275