1. Approaches to using MICS for Equity/Poverty Analysis
Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys Data Dissemination - Further Analysis Workshop
Approaches to using MICS
for Equity/Poverty Analysis
MICS4 Data Dissemination and Further Analysis Workshop

2. Multidimensional Poverty Indices
Outline
Consumption/income poverty
Wealth Index
Bristol Child Deprivation Index
Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)
New Development (MODA, CDS)
Critics

3. Multidimensional Poverty Indices -Background
Once upon a time…
….INCOME/CONSUMPTION POVERTY
Three main decisions:
1. How do we assess individual well-being or "welfare"? Income or consumption
2. At what level of measured well-being do we say that a person is not poor? Choose poverty lines
3. How do we aggregate individual indicators of well-being into a measure of poverty? FGT poverty measures

4. Multidimensional Poverty Indices - Background
UN General Assembly Definition of Child Poverty,
10th January 2007
“Children living in poverty are deprived of nutrition, water and sanitation facilities, access to basic health care services, shelter, education, participation and protection, and that while a severe lack of goods and services hurts every human being, it is most threatening and harmful to children, leaving them unable to enjoy their rights, to reach their full potential and to participate as full members of the society”

5. Multidimensional Poverty Indices WEALTH INDEX
Use information on assets or household possessions
It takes a large number of assets that may not tell us much individually, but are correlated since they are all related to an underlying factor – in this case, “wealth”
Generate weights (factor scores) for each of the assets through principal components analysis
Weights summed by household, household members ranked according to the total score of the household in which they reside
Divide the households into quintiles

6. Multidimensional Poverty Indices WEALTH INDEX
Number of persons per sleeping room
Material of dwelling floor
Material of the roof
Material of the walls
Fuel used for cooking
Electricity
Radio
Television
Mobile telephone
Non-mobile telephone
Refrigerator
Watch
Bicycle
Motorcycle/scooter
Animal-drawn cart
Car/truck
Boat
Source of drinking water
Type of sanitation facility
Ownership of animals
Ownership of land
Furniture
Additional household items

7. Multidimensional Poverty Indices WEALTH INDEX
Long-term wealth versus current economic status
Adjustment for household size?
How to deal with public services? Does the asset index reflect community variables (especially locally available infrastructure such as electricity for lighting or piped water) rather than household specific variables?
Urban bias
Strength of the index when comparing it over time and across countries

8. Multidimensional Poverty Indices BRISTOL POVERTY MEASURE
Developed by Bristol University - Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research with UNICEF
UNICEF's State of the World's Children report 2005
UNICEF launched at the end of 2007 the Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities that combines the income approach with the Bristol deprivations approach
(see
As of June 2011, 52 UNICEF Country Offices in seven regions have joined the study. A total of 23 country reports have been produced

9. Multidimensional Poverty Indices
Indicator
Shelter
More than 5 members per room, or no floor material
Sanitation
No toilet facility of any kind
Water
Use of surface water or source more than 30 min away
Information
No access to radio, television, telephone or newspapers at home
Nutrition
Severe stunting, wasting or underweight
Education
Children (7-17) never been to school
Health
No immunization or no treatment of ARI or diarrhoea

10. Multidimensional Poverty Indices
Children experiencing TWO OR MORE severe deprivations are absolute poor
Children experiencing ONE OR MORE severe deprivations are severely deprived
34% of children in the developing world (around 650 million) live in absolute poverty
56% of children in the developing world (over one billion) experience severe deprivation of at least one basic human need

11. Multidimensional Poverty Indices

13. Multidimensional Poverty Indices
Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)
Developed by Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative
(Sabina Alkire and James Foster 2007, 2009)
2010 United Nations Development Programme Human Development Report (104 countries)

14. Multidimensional Poverty Indices - MPI

15. Multidimensional Poverty Indices
Domain
Indicator
Health
Any child dead
Any adult or child malnourished
Education
No household member completed 5 years
Any child out of school
Standard of
No electricity
Living
Unimproved water or clean water more than 30 mins distant
Unimproved or shared sanitation
Dirt, sand, dung floor
Wood, charcoal, dung used as cooking fuel
Not owning more than one of: radio, TV, phone, bike, motorbike or a car/truck

16. Multidimensional Poverty Indices
Each dimension is equally weighted:
Health = 1/3
Education = 1/3
Standard of Living = 1/3
The MPI combines two aspects of poverty:
MPI = H x A
Incidence (H) = the percentage of people who are poor, or the headcount
Intensity (A) of people’s poverty = the average percentage dimensions in which poor people are deprived

17. MICS4 Regional Workshop
Indicators 1 2 3 4
Weight
Household size 7 5
HEALTH
At least one member malnourished
1.67
One or more children have died
EDUCATION
No one has completed five years of schooling
At least one school-age child not enrolled
LIVING CONDITIONS
No electricity
0.56
No access to clean drinking water
No access to adeguate sanitation
House has dirt floor
Household uses “dirty” cooking fuel
Household has no car and owns at most one of: bicycle, motorcycle, radio, refrigerator, telephone or television
RESULTS
Weighted count of deprivation, c
2.22
7.22
3.89
5.00
Is the household poor? c>3 NO
YES
MICS4 Regional Workshop

18. Multidimensional Poverty Indices
Weighted count of deprivation in household 1:
Headcount ratio=
(80 percent of people live in poor households)
Intensity of poverty=
(the average poor person is deprived in 56 percent of the weighted indicators)
MPI= H × A = 0.45

19. Multidimensional Poverty Indices
Results:
1.7 billion people, 32% of the total population in 104 countries, are identified as multi-dimensionally poor.
51% live in South Asia and 28% in sub-Saharan Africa
MICS4 Regional Workshop

21. MICS4 Regional Workshop
Countries with the highest incidence of poverty tend to have the highest intensity of poverty.
MICS4 Regional Workshop

22. Multidimensional Poverty Indices
Deprivation in living standards (the green portion) often contributes more than deprivation in either of the other two dimensions.
In most countries, the second biggest contribution comes from educational deprivations.

23. Multidimensional Poverty Indices
MPI and Income Poverty are related
PEARSON CORR.
$ 1.25/day–MPI = 0.85
More persons are MPI poor than income poor

24. Multidimensional Poverty Indices
MPI at the regional level

25. Multidimensional Poverty Indices
New development…
Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) (IRC/Unicef)
CHILD DEPRIVATION SCORE (UNICEF)

26. Multidimensional Poverty Indices
CRITICS (Ravallion 2011)
Indicators likely to be correlated with consumption or income, but they would not capture well the impacts on poor people of economic downturns or quick economic shocks.
As data is to be collected from the same survey, the precise indicators used in the MPI are somehow data driven…
Indices adding up “apples and oranges” …
…how can one contend that the death of a child is equivalent to having a dirt floor, cooking with wood, and not having a radio, TV, telephone, bike or car?  Or that attaining these material conditions is equivalent to an extra year of schooling or to not having any malnourished family member?
Isn’t “multi-dimensional” about recognizing that there are important aspects of welfare that cannot be captured in a single index?
MULTIDIMENSIONAL INDICES TO COMPLEMENT TRADITIONAL ANALYSIS

27. References
Alkire, S. and Foster, J and Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Measurement. OPHI Working Paper 7 and 32. Alkire, S. and Santos, M.E Acute Multidimensional Poverty: A New Index for Developing Countries. OPHI Working Paper 38. Gordon, David, et al., Child poverty in the developing world, The Policy Press, Bristol, UK, October Ravallion, Martin, On Multidimensional Indices of Poverty (February 1, 2011). World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series, Vol. , pp. -, Rutstein, Shea O. and Kiersten Johnson The DHS Wealth Index. DHS Comparative Reports No. 6. Calverton, Maryland: ORC Macro. Rutstein, Shea O The DHS Wealth Index: Approaches for Rural and Urban Areas Sahn, David E. and David Stifel “Poverty Comparisons over Time and Across Countries in Africa.” World Development 28(12):

28. Some examples

29. Some examples

30. MICS4 Regional Workshop
Some examples
MICS4 Regional Workshop

31. THANK YOU