Counting poverty orderings and deprivation curves
A counting approach based on the number of deprivations suffered by the poor is quite an appropriate framework to measure multidimensional poverty with ordinal or categorical data. A method to identify the poor and a number of poverty indices has been proposed taking this framework into account. The implementation of this methodology involves the choice of a minimum number of deprivations required in order for an individual to be identified as poor. This cut-off and the choice of a poverty measure to aggregate the data are two sources of arbitrariness in poverty comparisons.
This paper examines dominance conditions in order to guarantee unanimous poverty rankings in a counting framework. The implementation of these conditions is based on two different types of curves we refer to as dimension deprivation curves. These curves become a useful way to check the robustness of poverty rankings to changes in the identification cut-off and/or in the counting measure. They also offer a useful way to determine the bounds of the number of dimensions for which multidimensional comparisons are robust.
We illustrate the method with an empirical application.
