'Poor are disproportionately exposed to violence,' Dr Sabina Alkire

BR Research: Please elaborate on the efficacy of the MPI index and how it adds to insights about incidence of poverty in a country, Dr Sabina Alkire: The MPI is an international measure of acute poverty that measures deprivations in three dimensions: education, health and living standards.
Mathematically, the MPI looks at something called the 'joint distribution of deprivation' (the intensity of poverty or the number of deprivations a poor person experiences at the same time), while most other poverty measures look at one kind of deprivation at a time.
Income-poverty measures, for example, look at the income of a household, not how it is distributed within the household. Nor do they capture how income can fluctuate greatly during the course of a year. A malnutrition measure, meanwhile, does consider people within a household, so if data is available, it can present a look at the state of nutrition within households. However, such data is often unavailable. For example, we do not have data on malnutrition among men for many countries.
We also don't know if people who are malnourished are also illiterate. We don't know if they also live in poor quality housing. What the MPI adds to our understanding of poverty is how these dimensions interact. The motivation is three-fold: first to understand who is poorest, secondly to reveal the interconnections among deprivations, and thirdly to give policy makers tools.
Typically, if a policy affects those who are marginally poor and brings them above a poverty line, this change is reflected in poverty numbers. But, if conditions for someone who is extremely poor improve just slightly, they would still lie below the poverty threshold and national poverty levels remain unchanged. Yet, their life would be impacted dramatically.
With the MPI there are two ways in which policymakers can get credit for such improvements. First of all just like the income 'head count' approach which captures the number of people who are below the poverty line, if a person is lifted above the MPI poverty line, the incidence of poverty in the country reduces. Secondly, if a person is deprived in 70 percent of MPI dimensions and due to policy action their situation improves marginally, this improvement is reflected in the MPI. This innovation gives policymakers incentives to reach out to the poorest people.
Indicators in the multi-dimensional poverty approach can be chosen according to the national context. If the indicators such as malnutrition and housing services are chosen, then they can reflect changes immediately whereas other indicators take time to register changes.
BRR What kind of indicators should be used in Pakistan?
SA: In Pakistan, I would definitely use malnutrition because it is a direct measure of food security and much more revealing than simple questions regarding access to food. Malnutrition is also a relatively high in South Asia so it would be interesting to know if that is the case in Pakistan as well. Besides indicators such as child and youth mortality, it may be helpful to use additional indicators on health, disability and morbidity. There are many households in Pakistan where at least one family member is physically disabled either due to old age or some other factor. Given a fixed income, such households obviously have to contend with some additional expenses and these also have to be taken into account when measuring poverty in the country.
In the education indicators, we should monitor attendance at school but it is important to account for the quality of education imparted at educational institutions. This may not matter a lot for certain segments such as the elderly but it is still a good indicator for Pakistan.
There can be a lot of improvement in terms of indicators that measure living standards, for example we should introduce work, land holding, ownership of livestock and other kinds of assets. A consumption measure provides crucial insights about discretionary spending, so a short consumption module can be used.
Studies have shown that internationally, the poor are disproportionately exposed to violence. So incidence of violence and the level of political participation, especially at local level, are other key indicators that could be quite revealing for Pakistan. But in the end, a poverty measure must be very simple and very focused, and it must reflect the serious policy priorities. Most poverty measures have three to seven dimensions only.
BRR: How do you measure the quality of education?
SA: Quality of education is a difficult measure. Besides specially designed questionnaires to be filled by students, one way is to ask children in the survey households to read short paragraphs and answer questions about it. That is not so difficult to administer and it gives a very enlightening view of whether children are able to read and comprehend - if the children are home, that is.
Then there are other measures such as text book availability, teacher to pupil ratios, school facilities and supervision, achievement scores and test scores. Respondents can then be mapped according to the school they attend, which would present an accurate assessment of the quality of education being imparted at that school. Such information can be very useful for policy makers as they would know about the specific needs of each school.
To sum up the discussion on indicators I would add that people can come up with indicators ad infinitum. The problem with too many indicators is that policy makers wouldn't know which to follow and how much importance to accord to each. Then the collection of data would also become increasingly difficult. It is better to start off with a relatively small number of indicators over which there is consensus and for which good data can be collected regularly.
BRR: Violence, political uncertainty and social turmoil have strong impacts on people's lives and their perceptions. In your opinion, are there ways to assess these impacts on people with regards to their productivity and efficiency?
SA: The Bhutan government's Gross National Happiness Index (GNH) is a helpful example here. It has nine dimensions including health, education and living standards (dimensions of poverty). Other dimensions also include governance (voting, perceptions of rights, political participation and service delivery), environment and time use.
Then it also takes into account elements of community vitality and cultural factors such as special occasions and volunteerism. The final dimension is psychological happiness. By that they mean satisfaction in different domains of life along with emotional balance between positive and negative emotions. Spirituality is also a key aspect in this context, especially in Pakistan. I think that the perception of happiness is a lot more holistic here as compared to Western cultures. There, happiness can be a narcissistic notion whereas in Bhutan it is typically more deeply integrated with the family or the community.
BRR: Please share with us some experiences about the implementation of policies derived from results of MPI.
SA: Mexico launched its multi-dimensional poverty measure in December 2009 and recently updated it. Their measure has income with a weight of 50 percent and six measures of deprivation which they conceive as human rights that are equally weighted. A person is considered deprived if they are poor according to the income measure along with at least one of the six social rights. What was very useful was that each of six social rights they have used represents constitutional guarantees in the country.
So these are promises that the government has made to the nation. When they updated the measure in 2011 in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008, they found that income-poverty and food insecurity had risen. But due to their wider perspective, they were also able to show that although national poverty had risen, it was largely due to external shocks. Mexico's national MPI had in fact fallen in five out of the six indicators. So it provided useful information to policy makers about why poverty had risen and whether their own policies were contributing effectively to their intended goals or not.
Another example comes from Colombia where there was a problem similar to Pakistan in that their data series on income-poverty had been discontinued due to problems in data collection. So they didn't have income-poverty data, which was creating issues for policy makers. So what they did was first of all they worked separately to repair the income series and they implemented a new survey to release a current income figure, using this to calculate trends across time.
Then they also created a nationally-adapted MPI (the MPI-Colombia) where each of its 15 indicators were paired with fixed poverty-reduction targets for 2014 as set out in their national plan. They did two things that were very wise: first they back analysed existing data and second, they set definite goals to be achieved in a set time span. This kind of courageous leadership and commitment to poverty can be transformative, whether in Colombia or in Pakistan.
Dr Sabina Alkire - Profile Dr Sabina Alkire directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), an economic research centre within the Department of International Development, University of Oxford. She did her DPhil fieldwork in Pakistan at the Human Development Research Centre under Mahbub ul Haq, and with Oxfam Pakistan, and holds a DPhil in Economics from Magdalen College, Oxford.