Multidimensional poverty measurement in Europe: An application of the adjusted headcount approach
- 17 April 2014
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Journal of European Social Policy
- Vol. 24 (2), 183-197
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0958928713517914
Abstract
As awareness of the limitations of relying solely on income to measure poverty has become more widespread, attention has been increasingly focused on multi-dimensional approaches, to the point where the European Union (EU) has adopted a multidimensional poverty and social exclusion target for 2020. The rationale advanced is that the computation of a multidimensional poverty index is an effective way of communicating in a political environment, and a necessary tool in order to monitor 27 different national situations. In contrast with the rather ad hoc way in which the EU 2020 poverty target has been framed and rationalized, the adjusted head count ratio applied here has a number of desirable axiomatic properties. It constitutes a significant improvement on union and intersection approaches and allows for the decomposition of multidimensional poverty in terms of dimensions of deprivation and socio-economic attributes. Since understanding poverty as multidimensional does not necessarily require constructing a multidimensional poverty index, on the basis of our analysis we provide a more general consideration of the value of developing a multidimensional index of poverty for the EU.Keywords
Other Versions
This publication has 18 references indexed in Scilit:
- Understanding material deprivation: A comparative European analysisResearch in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2012
- Varieties of poverty reduction: Inserting the poverty and social exclusion target into Europe 2020Journal of European Social Policy, 2012
- Counting and multidimensional poverty measurementJournal of Public Economics, 2011
- Welfare regime and social class variation in poverty and economic vulnerability in Europe: an analysis of EU-SILCJournal of European Social Policy, 2010
- Multidimensional approaches to poverty measurement: an empirical analysis of poverty in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, based on the European panelApplied Economics, 2009
- Fuzzy measures of the incidence of relative poverty and deprivation: a multi-dimensional perspectiveStatistical Methods & Applications, 2007
- The Case for an EU-wide Measure of PovertyEuropean Sociological Review, 2006
- Aggregate level and determining factors of social exclusion in twelve European countriesJournal of European Social Policy, 2002
- Multiple deprivation and persistent poverty in the European UnionJournal of European Social Policy, 2002
- Income, Deprivation, and Economic Strain. An Analysis of the European Community Household PanelEuropean Sociological Review, 2001