Sabina Alkire on Measuring Poverty

Transcript

Key DE: DAVID EDMONDS

SA: SABINA ALKIRE

DE:This is Social Science Bites with me, David Edmonds. Social Science Bites is a series of interviews with leading social scientists and is made in association with Sage Publishing. Armenia, Bhutan, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and so on-- what do these and many more countries have in common? Well, they’ve all used what’s called the Alkire-Foster Method to create their own multidimensional measures of poverty levels. The Alkire-Foster Method was developed at Oxford. One of the two people after whom the measure is named is Sabina Alkire. Sabina Alkire, welcome to Social Science Bites.

SA:It’s lovely to be here. Thank you so much.

DE:The topic we’re talking about today is measurement of poverty. How has poverty traditionally been measured?

SA:Usually, it has been a monetary measure-- either consumption or income. And a person is deemed to be poor if they don’t have enough by some poverty line. Then they’re identified as poor. And the poverty line is either based on some basket of goods or a food that they can buy with it. Or it’s relative to the society that they live in. By the World Bank’s Extreme Income Poverty Measure, a SAGE SAGE Research Methods Podcasts 2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. person is poor if they earn less than $1.90 a day. And the aim of the Sustainable Development Goals is to end that form of extreme income poverty.

DE:So we’re given a figure. That sounds perfectly sensible. What could be wrong with that?

SA:So it’s very important. It must be always used and always considered. Because income gives a person a freedom. Income reflects a constraint upon them if they don’t have enough of it. So I’m not at all against income poverty measures or consumption poverty measures. But it doesn’t tell the whole story. And a person is also poor if they are malnourished, and their house is decaying, and they don’t have a job, and they’re not educated, or their children is not attending school, or they’re victims of violence. And so when you talk with poor people about what poverty is, they give a much more three-dimensional account. And the measures of poverty that capture those other forms are not perfectly correlated with the monetary poverty measure.

DE:I understand most of those dimensions that you mentioned. Let me just pick up on one of them. You said victims of violence. People can be victims of violence in extremely wealthy families commonly. And that doesn’t make them poor.

SA:That’s true. But when there’s a multiplicity of things happening at the same time and going wrong, people describe it as poverty. To give an example, in El Salvador, they carried out a two-year participatory study with poor people in communities on what poverty was. And one of the features that this participatory study introduced that the previous people thinking about poverty in El Salvador did not include was violence. And they felt that, in their neighborhoods, the level of violence was so high that after a certain time in the afternoon they couldn’t go out safely. It inhibited their work. And they were more affected than other groups of the population. And so it is a part of the poverty, although it’s not only affecting them. But similarly, a person could be malnourished for reasons that do not have

Page 2 of 11 Sabina Alkire on Measuring Poverty SAGE SAGE Research Methods Podcasts 2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. to do with poverty-- that either have to do with health or recovery from an illness. They could also have lost a child. And it’s not from poverty, it’s from a tragedy. So there are many features of poverty, one by one that may not actually be related to a material lack. But when you bring them together, they usually are.

DE:And that’s why you came up with a new way of measuring poverty, which is called-- let me get this right-- the global Multidimensional Poverty Index, or the MPI, which is a basket of criteria.

SA:Yes. The global MPI is a measure of poverty. But before that, we created, with James Foster, who is a well-known architect of income poverty measures as well, we created a general purpose methodology for looking at poverty’s many forms and dimensions. And this was drawing on the work of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen in economics, who recognized that poor people’s lives are battered and diminished in many and various ways, drawing on voices of the poor and other deeply contextual participatory studies. And a large range of issues and movements that really portray poverty is much broader than income-- including it, but also including these other types of deprivations. So the methodology can be used in different contexts. But it basically looks at the different dimensions of poverty, indicators of poverty that a person is experiencing together, and comes up with a measure. And the global MPI implements that for a very acute definition of poverty for over 100 developing countries.

DE:Explain to me what those criteria are. So they would be things like sanitation, housing, as well as income?

SA:So the global MPI does not include income. It can’t, because the surveys we draw on don’t have income in there. But it’s health, like malnutrition or if a child has died, very sadly. It’s education if nobody in the household has completed five years of schooling, if a child is not attending school. And then, like you said, there are a number of household indicators of living standard, like sanitation and

Page 3 of 11 Sabina Alkire on Measuring Poverty SAGE SAGE Research Methods Podcasts 2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. water and electricity and flooring, cooking fuel. And then if you own some small assets, like a radio or television, telephone, motorcycle, bicycle. In each of those 10 indicators in three dimensions, a person can be either deprived or not deprived. And so you sort of get a little profile of their deprivations. And the dimensions are equally weighted. And then if people as a total are deprived in more than one third of these dimensions at the same time, we identify them as poor. If they’re 20% or more, they’re vulnerable to poverty. If they’re 50% or more, then they’re severely poor. But we can see for each person, their individual deprivation score-- the percentage of deprivations they’re deprived in at the same time. And more is worse. And that’s the basis of a multidimensional measure. So you’re first looking at each life across the different realms or dimensions of their poverty and creating a score that reflects those and then combining it for a population.

DE:And on your criteria, do you have a number for how many are defined as poor around the world?

SA:Yes. In 2017 across the 103 developing countries, 1.45 billion are multidimensionally poor. And 706 million are destitute.

DE:It does mean that your criteria have to be consistent year in, year out. Because you could radically alter the numbers by just adjusting the criteria.

SA:Yes. So we were honored to develop the global MPI with the UNDP-- United Nations Development Programme-- Human Development Report Office in 2010 in the 20-year anniversary of the Human Development Index. And since 2010, we have kept on the methodology unchanged. Of course, we’ve added more countries and more surveys. And also, very sadly, population has grown. And so even though the level of poverty has come down, the number of poor people have not come down as quickly because of the rapid population growth in many countries.

DE:Tell me what the methodology is for accumulating that data. Where do you get your stats from?

SA:So we use surveys that are in the public domain. For over 50 countries, we use demographic and health surveys that have traditionally been funded by United States Agency for International Development. For over 30 countries, we use the multiple indicator cluster surveys funded by UNICEF. We use some PAPFAM surveys in the Arab region, and then a number of national surveys for Brazil and China and Mexico, Argentina, Jamaica, South Africa-- particular surveys for those countries.

DE:Are there some countries where the data is less reliable than in others?

SA:So the surveys that we use, we do have a very key eye on data quality. And we talk with data providers. And insofar as we can, all the surveys that we use are reliable for the purposes for which we use them. And we document any disturbances or any differences in our methodological documents. So we try to be very transparent. But what is shocking to a lot of people is that these are low- income countries-- least developed countries. But actually, thanks not to our work, but the work of Demographic and Health Survey and Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, we have good data for many countries.

DE:If you go to a shantytown in Mumbai or in Caracas in Venezuela, you can see poverty. You can see a family living in a fabricated hut. You know they’re poor. Why do you need to measure poverty?

SA:There are a number of reasons. I think a multidimensional measure gives one headline number. And as much as we love complexity-- and the Sustainable Development Goals have 231 indicators or more-- a headline is something that you can move. You try to move the needle. And we’ve learned a lot, both from the global MPI and also from national multidimensional poverty measures that

Page 5 of 11 Sabina Alkire on Measuring Poverty SAGE SAGE Research Methods Podcasts 2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. governments are creating, about how they do that. But one virtue of having a headline, which might be their income or consumption poverty measure and the MPI-- so they usually retain both measures-- is that the ministers have a common goal. And so it’s not that the Minister of Education is competing with the Minister of Housing and competing with Transport or with Education, but it’s that they, A, recognize, as the Minister of Health in Colombia said, I can’t meet my target without transportation and education-- so they recognize the interconnectedness. But also, they all win if they’re successful in reducing poverty. And so having a common goal helps with recognizing how intersectoral and multisectoral policies can be created because, again, you can see for each geographic region, ethnic group, age cohort, what are their particular combination of deprivations? So you can tailor the policy response and make it more effective with the same budget envelope.

DE:Give me an example where the detail of the numbers has helped motivate policy.

SA:So in 2011, President Santos of Colombia released their national MPI when he was starting his term of office. And he set targets for reducing it to a certain level by 2014. Twice a year, a round table of ministers met to consider how they were doing-- they updated their MPI every year and every quarter using administrative data-- and to do responsive policy-making for the indicators that were not moving fast enough. They met their target in 2014 and have set another one for 2018. Another example, much more recent, is in Costa Rica. They launched their MPI in October 2015. And they realized at that point that some of the indicators had zero budget allocation and that others had lots of duplication of programming. So they focused on budget allocation. And they set a presidential decree, by which now the budget has to reflect, among other things, the level and composition of multidimensional poverty nationally and subnationally. And so they’ve seen, again, an acceleration in their trends. And another example in a very different region is

Page 6 of 11 Sabina Alkire on Measuring Poverty SAGE SAGE Research Methods Podcasts 2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. in Pakistan, which launched its national MPI in 2016. And they had a 10-year time horizon of data already when they launched it, so they could learn a lot looking backwards. And it went down to the district level. And they found, for example, that the poorest district very happily had reduced multidimensional poverty the fastest of the districts. And so they could really learn what was it about the actions, both of civil society, of public sector and of private sector in that region that had caused that acceleration. So learning from past experience is sometimes less challenging than just taking a new measure off the shelf.

DE:National MPI differs from the global MPI index in that countries will focus on very specific factors-- factors that are unique to their own situation.

SA:Yes. Some are quite similar. Bhutan’s national MPI is very similar to the global MPI, but it adds food insecurity, land, livestock, and distance from a road. And there are a couple others that are quite similar to the global MPI because, in their contexts, that makes sense. And others are very different. So are in Armenia, it is a much different measure, because the aspirations of ridding Armenia of poverty are much higher. And so acute malnutrition is not in their index, but others are. So with a national MPI, just like a national income poverty measure, it is designed for the policy context and nationally owned and using, often, national data, but certainly as an official permanent statistic that’ll survive changes of government and political party. Many governments-- Ecuador, among many others-- put their own algorithms online. So people download them. They can compute them themselves. And this means that if there is a variable where you can have progress very quickly, such as access to the internet, then people observe that. But then, at some point it’ll stop coming down. And then the question will be, what about the other indicators? So of course, any government wants a measure they can reduce strongly in their own first period of election. But what if they are re-elected? They have to think about the long-term too.

DE:I imagine the political dynamics could be very useful in this, in that politicians can compete with each other to try and bring down the index on poverty.

SA:Yes. A colleague, Gonzalo Hernández Licona, who is the head of CONEVAL, the institution which does poverty measures for Mexico describes one of the unexpected outcomes of Mexico’s adoption of a national MPI in 2009. Mexico was the pioneer. And it is that at the state level, governors have become very interested. So Mexico, from the beginning, desegregated by indigenous people, by state, and other variables-- age and gender. And they found that now, in order to win elections, state governors have to describe what they are going to do to reduce multidimensional poverty of their state. And that was unexpected, again, for the technical measurement people. But we hope that it is beneficial to the poor people who are the ultimate aim of our technical work, as well.

DE:These are all measures of absolute poverty. But there is a lot of research now on relative poverty. And it’s relative poverty that seems to have an impact on our psychological well-being-- how well we’re doing compared to our neighbors and the people on the other side of town. You don’t measure that.

SA:No. We do in two ways. One is that we set different poverty cutoffs. So let me just give an example. If I went to look at destitution, then destitution would mean-- and does mean, in our measures-- severe malnutrition, having very tragically lost two children, nobody in your household has one year of schooling or more, you don’t have any toilets, so it’s open defecation. So very, very difficult. But you can go up one notch to acute poverty that I mentioned. Or you can go up another notch to anybody who hasn’t completed secondary school or anybody who doesn’t have a house with a finished floor or a flush toilet. And so you can go stepwise and set different vectors of deprivation cutoffs for each of the indicators. Recently, at the United Nations General Assembly, the League of Arab States, UNESCWA, and OPHI together launched a report on Arab poverty, which created a moderate

Page 8 of 11 Sabina Alkire on Measuring Poverty SAGE SAGE Research Methods Podcasts 2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. poverty measure for the Arab regions-- a more Arab definition of poverty, as well as replicating the global MPI. It’s not relative in a technical sense of being the median-- 40% of the median. But the other reason we cannot do a relative poverty measure has to do with a technical feature of the data. The data are often binary-- like, do you have electricity or not? Or they’re ordinal-- what is your source of sanitation? And you don’t know actually how much better this is than that. So you can’t take 40% of the median. So you can’t get a relative poverty measure of the same kind.

DE:Is that a flaw with your methodology? Because you talked about open defecation. If somebody has to live in those conditions in London, that’s clearly going to have a bigger impact on their lives and their psychological well-being than if they’re in a slum in Mumbai, surrounded by thousands of other people living under the same conditions.

SA:I think we need both. So the global MPI is a measure of acute multidimensional poverty. And it is very important to know if zero people in the UK have that kind of poverty. But like I said, national poverty measures always reflect the cultural contexts, the aspirations, the political ambitions of the society and are, in some sense-- conceptual sense-- relative to them.

DE:You’re an economist, a social scientist. Do you draw upon other disciplines? It sounds to me like this must be multidisciplinary work because there’s presumably an ethnographic element to it, an anthropological element to it.

SA:Very much so. Very much so. We go to the field and do participatory work, which was perhaps not part of the formal training. But it’s very important when you’ve done your measure in a capital city with the national statistics bureau. You and your colleagues go to a village. You identify who’s poor by the measure you just came up with. And then you ask them if you’re right. And it’s really fascinating, because you can get some very quick feedback on mistakes or oversights you

Page 9 of 11 Sabina Alkire on Measuring Poverty SAGE SAGE Research Methods Podcasts 2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. may have made. So for example, in Bhutan, we had some draft measures of the national MPI and took them to the communities to say, do these represent who is poor? And if not, why not? And they could give us examples of, for example, the land variable. They wanted us to look at the fertility of the land, because in Punakha it’s, of course, much more fertile than it was in Gaza. And so irrigation was the wrong variable. But we looked at what we had data for and came up with a better definition. You also get things that break your heart, but that you will never be able to fix technically. One man had a cow. And by our livestock variable, if you had a cow, you were not deprived. But his cow didn’t give milk. She was very old. And he’d lost his wife. And his cow was his best friend. You’re never going to be able to fix that technically. So you have to really be humbled as a measurement person by the limits of what you’ll be able to measure and just always remember that it’s the best we can do.

DE:You serve outside academia as an Anglican priest. Is one of the reasons you’ve chosen the subject you have chosen to specialize in your faith?

SA:Definitely. Definitely. Many faiths, including mine as a Christian, but also Buddhist or Muslim, they have solidarity. They have a deep respect or a compassion towards other people. And that, certainly, for me was what forms my own work and what continues to motivate it, and when one needs other resources than that, is what one draws on. The faith is part of one’s identity. And so you can’t sort of separate yourself from it. But this work gives me a lot of joy and a lot of feeling that it’s a meaningful path, even if there are difficulties and struggles. And at the same time, serving in a parish keeps your feet on the ground.

DE:What would you like the impact of your work to be?

SA:Very much, I hope that we, together-- that many, many different people working in their professions and working in movements in civil society organizations and businesses that we are better able-- using the measurement

Page 10 of 11 Sabina Alkire on Measuring Poverty SAGE SAGE Research Methods Podcasts 2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. tools, but also other tools that have us come up with an analysis-- that we can really end some of the terrible misery that continues, that is needless, and that can be, in a sense, ended without too much work, I believe. And I really hope that this is a generation that will be able to accomplish that together.

DE:Sabina Alkire, thank you very much, indeed.

SA:Thank you.

DE:Social Science Bites is made in association with Sage Publishing. For more interviews, go to socialsciencespace.com.

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