Multidimensional Poverty Index

The Multidimensional Poverty Index applies the Alkire-Foster method, introduced by Sabina Alkire and James Foster in 2011, to measure poverty as the joint deprivation of individuals across several dimensions such as health, education, and living standards. Its signature is a dual-cutoff identification: a person is deprived in an indicator if they fall below that indicator's cutoff, and they are counted as multidimensionally poor only if their weighted count of deprivations crosses a cross-dimensional cutoff k. The headline measure is the adjusted headcount ratio M0 = H times A, the product of the share of people who are poor (incidence) and the average breadth of their deprivations (intensity).