Measuring Chronic Multidimensional Poverty: A Counting Approach

How can indices of multidimensional poverty be adapted to produce measures that quantify both the joint incidence of multiple deprivations and their chronicity? This paper adopts a new approach to the measurement of chronic multidimensional poverty. It relies on the counting approach of Alkire and Foster (2011) for the measurement of multidimensional poverty in each time period and then on the duration approach of Foster (2009) for the measurement of multidimensional poverty persistence across time. The proposed indices are sensitive both to (i) the share of dimensions in which people are deprived and (ii) the duration of their multidimensional poverty experience. A related set of indices is also proposed to measure transient poverty. The behaviour of the proposed two families is analysed using a relevant set of axioms. An empirical illustration is provided with a Chilean panel dataset spanning the period from 1996 to 2006.