Multidimensional Deprivation Spectrum: A Step Forward from Alkire–Foster Methodology

Abstract

Income-based poverty and multidimensional poverty are two major paradigms currently in use to define and measure poverty. Both these paradigms, however, take individuals as units of analysis and classify them on the basis of certain poverty lines and cut-offs as poor and non-poor. Social stigma and labelling theory suggest that the label of poverty negatively impacts the self-esteem of people or contributes to the tendencies of paternalistic dependency among them. This article suggests that poverty should be measured using dimensions of life as units of analysis. In this direction, it offers a variant of the Alkire and Foster (Counting and multidimensional poverty measures, OPHI Working Paper No. 7, Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative, 2007) multidimensional poverty index in the form of a multidimensional deprivation spectrum. Along with using different dimensions as units of analysis, the current article presents a whole spectrum of indices built to measure inequality for a more nuanced picture.