The Information Basis of Multivariate Poverty Assessments

Abstract

Evaluation of household or individual well-being is now widely accepted as a multi-attribute exercise. Far less agreement exists on such matters as which attributes to include, how such attributes are related and/or contribute to overall well-being, and what criteria to employ for complete (that is, index-based) ranking of well-being situations. Some degree of robustness may be sought through weak uniform rankings of states, as by stochastic dominance and related criteria. A useful starting point, both for the believers and non-believers in the multidimensional approach, is to see the traditional univariate assessments in the multiattribute setting: it is as though a weight of one is attached to a single attribute, typically income or consumption, and zero weights given to all other real and potential factors! Univariate approaches do not avoid, they rather impose very strong a priori values.

We thank the editors for their invitation to participate and for constructive input and reviews. This research was supported by funds from the Robert & Nancy Dedman Chair in Economics at SMU. Finally, we thank Kathleen Beegle and Jed Friedman for providing the adjusted expenditure data.