This paper proposes to use an information theory approach to the design of multidimensional poverty indices. Traditional monetary approaches to poverty rely on the strong assumption that all relevant attributes of well-being are perfectly substitutable. Based on the idea of the essentiality of...

Agency is inescapably plural in both concept and measurement. In Sen’s account of agency, i) agency is exercised with respect to goals the person values; ii) agency includes effective power as well as direct control; iii) agency may advance wellbeing or may address other-regarding goals; iv)...

Violence impedes human freedom to live safely and securely, and can sustain poverty traps in many communities. A key challenge for academics, policy makers and practitioners working broadly in programs aimed at poverty alleviation, including violence prevention, is the lack of reliable and...

This article sets out a proposal to measure psychological and subjective states of wellbeing in individual and household surveys. In particular, it proposes a short list of seven indicators, and a module containing the relevant questions needed to construct them. The indicators address both...

For economic ideas to take root and change history, a number of ingredients need to be present, ranging from individual agents to policy implementation. This paper identifies certain strategic levers that underlay the success of free market economists in promoting their approach in academia,...

Important steps have been taken at international summits to set up goals and targets to improve the wellbeing of children worldwide. Now the world also has more and better data to monitor progress. This paper presents a new approach to monitoring progress in child poverty reduction based on the...

This paper examines the aggregation of an indicator of wellbeing over time and across people to measure poverty. We characterise the general form of an intertemporal poverty measure under mild normative principles and show that it must embody an unambiguous ordering of possible trajectories of...

Under quite likely conditions, data measurement errors can cause an (upward) bias in unidimensional poverty estimates and thus mislead both conceptual analyses and policy implications. In the case of multidimensional poverty, we find that by proposing a dual cut-off strategy, the Alkire-Foster...

A new class of chronic poverty measures is constructed that builds upon Jalan and Ravallion (1998) but does not require resources in different periods to be perfect substitutes when identifying the chronically poor. We use a general mean to combine the resources of a person into a permanent...

We compute a national multidimensional poverty index (MPI) for Uganda following the approach proposed by Alkire and Foster (2007). Using household survey data, we show how the incidence of multidimensional poverty has fallen in recent years, and we use the decomposability features of the index...