The capability approach defines poverty as a deprivation of capabilities, as a lack of multiple freedoms people value and have reason to value. Chronic poverty focuses attention on that subset of poor persons whose capability deprivations endure across time. But how should the dimensions of...

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...

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...