Headcount measures of poverty are by far the most common tools for evaluating poverty and gauging progress in global development goals. The headcount ratio, or the prevalence of poverty, and the headcount, or the number of the poor, both convey tangible information about poverty. But both ignore...

In order to understand whether a reduction in overall poverty has improved the situations of the poorest, it is crucial to distinguish them from the moderately poor population. In this paper, we explore the mechanisms to distinguish subsets of the poor in a multidimensional counting framework....

This paper presents the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), a measure of acute poverty, understood as a person’s inability to meet minimum international standards in indicators related to the Millennium Development Goals and to core functionings. It constitutes the first implementation of...

We recently introduced a general method for measuring poverty when there are multiple dimensions [1,2] and provided a specific cross-country implementation (the MPI) as part of the 2010 Human Development Report [4,11] to complement existing methods. Our recent piece in the Journal of Economic...

Multidimensional measures provide an alternative lens through which poverty may be viewed and understood. In recent work we have attempted to offer a practical approach to identifying the poor and measuring aggregate poverty (Alkire and Foster 2011). As this is quite a departure from traditional...