Multidimensional Poverty Index

Advantages of MPI

  • The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) has been published by the HDRO in the annual Human Development Report since 2010.
  • The MPI has been an interesting and important effort to provide a household-level multidimensional poverty measure that can compete in depth and coverage with the widely used (and problematic) $1.25 a day income poverty indicator.
  • Income based poverty measures are incomplete as compared to MPI.
  • Measuring and comparing multidimensional poverty over time has become increasingly important and frequent in effective implementation of welfare schemes and policies.
  • The MPI is a measure of “acute” poverty because it reflects overlapping deprivation in basic needs. If a person is deprived in 20-33.3% of the weighted indicators they are considered ‘Vulnerable to Poverty’, and if they are deprived in 50% or more, they are identified as being in ‘Severe Poverty.
  • MPI is more of a qualitative and quantitative approach towards the poverty issues.
  • The MPI methodology shows areas in which the poor are deprived and helps to identify inter-connections among those deprivations. This enables policymakers to target resources and design policies more effectively.

Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)

  • The MPI provides the most comprehensive view of the various ways in which 1.3 billion people worldwide experience poverty in their daily life.
  • The MPI looks at the multifaceted nature of poverty. It identifies people’s deprivations across three key dimensions – health, education and living standards, lacking amenities such clean water, sanitation, adequate nutrition or primary education. Those who are left behind in at least a third of the MPI’s components are defined as multidimensionally poor.
  • The major conceptual problem has been the neglect of inequality in the spread of dimensions across the population while calculating MPI.
  • The dimensions and the respective indicators used are:
  • Education: Years of schooling and child enrolment (1/6 weightage each, total 2/6);
  • Health: Child mortality and nutrition (1/6 weightage each, total 2/6);
  • Standard of living: Electricity, flooring, drinking water, sanitation, cooking fuel and assets (1/18 weightage each, total 2/6)

Location: Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India

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