Poverty and its many faces: An analytical framework for deprivation interlinkages
Multidimensional poverty measurement builds on deprivation indicators, which capture shortfalls in diverse dimensions of human well-being. In this paper we propose an analytical framework for the popular Alkire-Foster approach to multidimensional poverty measurement, which permits a more granular view on the overlap or interlinkage of depri- vations. Our approach can analyse individual or groups of deprivation profiles, and relies on two measures to describe arbitrary sets of deprivation profiles: their prevalence rate and co-deprivation rates for individual indicators. Moreover, we link our new measures for deprivation profiles to the conventional indices of the Alkire Foster framework, including the adjusted headcount ratio, which permits a novel form of decomposition. We also show how certain statistical methods, such as latent class analysis, can be coherently used in our framework to explore the deprivation interlinkage further. Our empirical illustration of the framework uses the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and data for 111 countries representing 6.1 billion people. We discuss how our approach can be applied in different settings and how it can inform policymakers. Our analytical framework can also be used to explore the interlinkage of different Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the micro-level, as several of our analyses do not require a poverty measure in the first place.