Poverty and wellbeing are multi-dimensional. Nobody questions that deprivations and achievements go beyond income. There is, however, sharp disagreement on whether the various dimensions of poverty and wellbeing can be aggregated into a single, multi-dimensional index in a meaningful way. Is...

This paper aims at presenting an assessment of welfare reforms under a framework of program heterogeneity and alternative measures of success. We focus on a specific welfare program –Madrid’s Ingreso Madrileño de Integración (IMI)– which comprises heterogeneous subprograms. We test...

When measuring poverty with counting measures, are there conditions ensuring that poverty reduction not only reduces the average poverty score further but also decreases deprivation inequality among the poor more, thereby emphasizing improvements among the poorest of the poor? In the case of a...

A natural concern with multivariate poverty measures, as well as with other composite indices, is the robustness of their ordinal comparisons to changes in the indices’ parameter values. Applying multivariate stochastic dominance techniques, this paper derives the distributional conditions...

Widespread agreement that poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing deprivations along multiple dimensions, clashes with often vociferous disagreement about how best to measure these deprivations. Drawing on the recent literature, this short note proposes three methodological...

This paper aims to explore properties that guarantee that multidimensional poverty indices are sensitive to the distribution among the poor, one of the basic features of a poverty index. We introduce a generalization of the monotonicity sensitivity axiom which demands that, in the...

In this paper we study the correspondence between a household’s current income and its vulnerability to income shocks in two developed countries: the U.S. and Spain. Vulnerability is measured by the availability of wealth type resources to smooth consumption in a multidimensional approach to...

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...

In the context of the binomial decomposition of OWA functions, we investigate the parametric constraints associated with the 3-additive case in n dimensions. The resulting feasible region in two coefficients is a convex polygon with n vertices and n edges, and is strictly increasing in the...

This paper suggests multidimensional affluence measures for the top of the distribution. In contrast to commonly used top income shares, they allow the analysis of the extent, intensity and breadth of affluence in several dimensions within a common framework. We illustrate this by analyzing the...