Suman Seth

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Leeds

Many health indicators are bounded, that is, their values lie between a lower and an upper bound. Inequality measurement with bounded variables faces two normative challenges well‐known in the health inequality literature. One is that inequality rankings may or may not be consistent across admissible attainment and shortfall representations of the...

Affirmative action policies, common to many countries, aim to provide preferential treatment to those belonging to disadvantaged communities. Contemporary studies that examine the effect of India's affirmative action policies implicitly assume that intended beneficiaries are eligible for targeted benefits. However, an intended beneficiary is unable...

There is a strong consensus that development is multifaceted and, consequently, various measurement tools involving multiple dimensions have been developed. In this chapter, we outline a number of such multidimensional measurement techniques for assessing well-being, human development and poverty. We begin the chapter outlining the key motivations...

Numerous non-pecuniary variables of interest for inequality assessment are bounded and often represented in terms of attainments or shortfalls. Inequality measurement for bounded variables suffers from two key challenges: the consistency problem and the boundary problem. The former occurs when inequality rankings reverse while switching between att...

Post reform India has generated high economic growth, yet progress in income poverty and many other key development outcomes has been modest. This chapter primarily examines how inclusive economic growth has been in India between 2005–2006 and 2015–2016 in reducing multidimensional poverty captured by the global multidimensional poverty index (MPI)...

Post reform India has generated high economic growth, yet progress in income poverty and many other key development outcomes has been modest. This paper primarily examines how inclusive economic growth has been in India between 2005-06 and 2015-16 in reducing multidimensional poverty captured by the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). We e...

This paper proposes a decomposition of a general class of absolute measures of panel welfare change into growth, dispersion and exchange mobility components, which is useful for both intergenerational and intragenerational mobility assessments. We show that this decomposition is the only one within a broad set of possibilities that satisfies a key...

Anti‐poverty programs increasingly target multiple outcomes to address current and future poverty. Conventional evaluation exercises, however, estimate programs’ impact on outcomes separately. We present a framework, drawing from the counting approach, that captures the joint distribution of outcomes and allows evaluating program impact on the dist...

The challenges associated with poverty measurement using a cardinal variable have received much attention over the past four decades, but there is a dearth of literature on how to meaningfully assess poverty with an ordinal variable. This article proposes a class of simple, intuitive, and policy-relevant poverty measures for ordinal variables. The...

Urban population in India has been rising rapidly as millions of migrants are moving to urban areas aspiring for higher earning and better living conditions. The number of urban poor is also growing, and a significant number of these poor find spaces in slums and continue to struggle for improved living standards. Improving their conditions call fo...

Anti-poverty programs increasingly target disadvantages in multiple outcomes to address current and future poverty. Conventional evaluation exercises, however, mostly estimate pro-grams' impacts separately. We present a framework, drawing from the counting approach, that captures the joint distribution of disadvantages and allows the evaluation of...

In the multidimensional poverty measurement literature, most measures satisfy the deprivation focus property, which means that they disregard any improvement in non-deprived achievements. Such measures cannot satisfy strong distributional properties as traditionally defined, because the distributional transformations among the poor are allowed to t...

Progress on the United Nations goals is often assessed using the widely known ‘headcount ratio’. This column argues that such an intuitive and popular measure is insufficient since different regions might face different realities in terms of deprivations within each indicator. This is demonstrated, for example, in the case of sanitation deprivation...

The 2019 global MPI publication Illuminating Inequalities released on 11 July 2019 sheds light on the number of people experiencing poverty at regional, national and subnational levels, revealing inequalities across countries and among the poor themselves. The publication is jointly developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (...

The challenges associated with poverty measurement within an axiomatic framework, especially with cardinal variables, have received due attention during the last four decades. However, there is a dearth of literature studying how to meaningfully assess poverty with ordinal variables, capturing the depth of deprivations. In this paper, we first prop...

Composite indices are widely used in development economics and can often be highly influential. Yet most remain controversial owing to inter alia the arbitrary selection of component weights. Several studies have proposed testing the robustness of rankings generated by composite indices with respect to alternative weights but have not provided suff...

As part of Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations have set targets of upgrading slums and reducing poverty in all its dimensions by 2030. Policies towards improving the living conditions of slum-dwellers require proper assessment of their standard of living as well as understanding the associated characteristics. In this paper, using slu...

The challenges associated with poverty measurement within an axiomatic framework, especially with cardinal variables, have received due attention during the last four decades. However, there is a dearth of literature studying how to meaningfully assess poverty with ordinal variables, capturing the depth of deprivations. In this paper, we first prop...

© 2018 The Author(s) Composite indices are widely used in development economics and can often be highly influential. Yet most remain controversial owing to inter alia the arbitrary selection of component weights. Several studies have proposed testing the robustness of rankings generated by composite indices with respect to alternative weights but h...

The measurement of inequality from a human development perspective is fundamental. We start this paper by briefly introducing the human development approach and its main conceptual basis: the capability approach. We note that inequality should preferably be assessed in the space of functionings, requiring the assessment methods to use multidimensio...

A phenomenal surge in number of urban slums and its population in many developing countries is identified as a major challenge for the overall urban development. Slums are not only deficient in infrastructure, but the standard of living of the slum-dwellers is also quite appalling. Deprivation is not limited to pecuniary factors; several non-pecuni...

A number of multidimensional poverty measures that respect the ordinal nature of dimensions have recently been proposed within the counting approach framework. Besides ensuring a reduction in poverty, however, it is important to monitor distributional changes to ensure that poverty reduction has been inclusive in reaching the poorest. Distributiona...

This paper explores the possibility of defining a non-utilitarian normative standard for assessments of welfare and deprivation. The paper formalises a key aspect of Amartya Sen’s critique of the assumption of consistent utility-maximisation in the revealed preference theory and proposes a generalisation of the standard Samuelsonian choice model fo...

Urban population in India has been rising rapidly as millions of migrants are moving to urban areas aspiring for higher earning and better living. The number of urban poor is also growing and a significant number of these poor find spaces in slums and continue to struggle for better living standards. Improving their conditions call for significant...

A reduction in overall poverty may not necessarily improve the situations of the poorest. In order to pay particular attention to the poorest, it is crucial to distinguish them from the moderately poor population. In income poverty measurement, this distinction is made by defining a more stringent poverty cutoff. In this paper, we explore such mech...

Multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis is evolving rapidly. Notably, it has informed the publication of the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) estimates in the Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Programme since 2010, and the release of national poverty measures in Mexico, Colombia, Bhutan, the Philippines and C...

This chapter introduces empirical issues that are distinctive to counting-based multidimensional poverty methodologies. It is crucial that indicators accurately reflect deprivations at the individual level and that all indicators be transformed to reflect deprivations in the chosen unit of analysis. This chapter is divided into four sections. The f...

This Chapter provides the reader with a general modelling framework for analysing the determinants of the Alkire and Foster (2011) poverty measures for both micro and macro levels of analyses. At the micro level, we present a model where the focal variable is a person’s poverty status. At the macro level we present a model where the focal variable...

For meaningful policy analysis, it is important not only to look at overall poverty, and compare countries or regions at a single point in time, but also to understand the distribution among the poor, the disparity across subgroups, and the dynamics of poverty. This extends the methodological toolkit presented in Chapter 5. First we present a new m...

This Chapter provides the reader with a general modelling framework for analysing the determinants of the Alkire and Foster (2011) poverty measures for both micro and macro levels of analyses. At the micro level, we present a model where the focal variable is a person’s poverty status. At the macro level we present a model where the focal variable...

The design of a poverty measure involves the selection of a set of parameters and poverty figures. In most cases the measures are estimated from sample surveys. This raises the question of how conclusive particular poverty comparisons are subject to both the set of selected parameters (or variations within a plausible range) and the sample datasets...

After a measurement methodology has been chosen, the design of poverty measures—whether unidimensional or multidimensional—require a series of normative choices. These choices relate to the space of the measure, its purpose, unit of identification and analysis, dimensions, indicators, deprivation cutoffs, weights, and poverty line. The normative co...

This working paper introduces the notation and basic concepts that are used throughout the OPHI Working Papers 82-91. The Paper has five sections. First we review unidimensional poverty measurement with particular attention to the well-known Foster-Greer-Thorbecke measures of income poverty as many methods presented in OPHI Working Paper 84 (Chapte...

This chapter presents a constructive survey of the major existing methods for measuring multidimensional poverty. Many measures were motivated by the basic needs approach, the capability approach, and the social inclusion approach among others. This chapter reviews Dashboards, the composite indices approach, Venn diagrams, the dominance approach, s...

This chapter provides a systematic overview of the Alkire-Foster multidimensional measurement methodology with an emphasis on the Adjusted Headcount Ratio denoted (M_0 ). The chapter is divided into seven sections. The first shows how this measure combines the practical appeal of the counting tradition with the rigor of the axiomatic one. The secon...

The measurement of poverty involves identification: the fundamental step of deciding who is to be considered poor. A ‘counting approach’ is one way to identify the poor in multidimensional poverty measurement, which entails the intuitive procedure of counting the number of dimensions in which people suffer deprivation. Atkinson (2003) advised an en...

This paper is devoted to the discussion of the measurement of human development and poverty, especially in United Nations Development Program’s global Human Development Reports. We first outline the methodological evolution of different indices over the last two decades, focusing on the well‐known Human Development Index (HDI) and the poverty indic...

This paper provides a discussion on the empirical findings surrounding the design of human development, inequality and poverty measures. We focus on the United Nations Development Program approach to those issues, in particular regarding the human development index and the multidimensional poverty index.

This working paper presents the normative, empirical, and policy motivations for focusing on multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis in general, and one measurement approach in particular. The fundamental normative motivation is to create effective measures that better reflect poor people's experience, so that policies using such measures...

A number of multidimensional poverty measures have recently been proposed, within counting approach framework, respecting the ordinal nature of dimensions. Besides ensuring a reduction in poverty, however, it is important to monitor distributional changes to ensure that poverty reduction has been inclusive in reaching the poorest. Distributional is...

If development is about poverty reduction, then where the poorest live is an important question. This paper seeks to answer this question using an internationally comparable multidimensional poverty index (MPI) to identify the poor using household surveys across more than a hundred countries. We compare three approaches to identifying the bottom bi...

Poverty has many dimensions, which, in practice, are often binary or ordinal in nature. A number of multidimensional measures of poverty have recently been proposed that respect this ordinal nature. These measures agree that the consideration of inequality across the poor is important, which is typically captured by adjusting the poverty measure to...

Poverty has many dimensions, which, in practice, are often binary or ordinal in nature. A number of multidimensional measures of poverty have recently been proposed that respect this ordinal nature. These measures agree that the consideration of inequality across the poor is important, which is typically captured by adjusting the poverty measure to...

India has witnessed high economic growth since the 1980s, and a reduction in the share of income poor, though the measured extent of this reduction varies, has been confirmed by different methods. Poverty, however, has multiple dimensions, hence this paper explores the improvement in other social deprivations. An analysis of poverty from a multidim...

Exercises to identify households living below the poverty line have taken place three times, and a fourth one is under way. Though the latest method aims to improve upon previous methods, its empirical implications and precise justification are not yet clear. This paper empirically examines the Socio-Economic Caste Census methodology and compares i...

The identification of poor households has been passionately debated in India. Since 1992 the Indian government has identified households as living below the poverty line (BPL) and hence eligible for certain benefits. Such identification exercises occurred three times, and a fourth BPL identification exercise is underway. Although the fourth BPL ide...

This paper proposes how to select a methodology to target multidimensionally poor households, and how to update that targeting exercise periodically. We present this methodology in the context of discussions regarding the selection of a targeting methodology in India. In 1992, 1997, and 2002 the Indian government identified households that are Belo...

This article evaluates the robustness of rankings obtained from composite indices that combine information from two or more components via a weighted sum. It examines the empirical prevalence of robust comparisons using the method proposed by Foster et al. (2010). Indices examined are the Human Development Index (HDI), the Index of Economic Freedom...

In 2010, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) in collaboration with the United National Development Programme (UNDP) introduced a new multidimensional measure of acute poverty for developing countries, referred to as the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) (Alkire and Santos, 2010). This paper focuses on the new analyses of s...

This paper axiomatically characterizes a class of two-parameter generalized mean social welfare indices having two or more dimensions of well-being. These indices, under appropriate parametric restrictions, are sensitive to two distinct forms of inter-personal inequality. The first form of inequality is concerned with the dispersion of each dimensi...

to identify eligible beneficiaries. On the one hand, the data were of poor quality and coverage, and were influenced by corruption; on the other hand, the methodology suffered a number of flaws, particularly in treating ordinal data as cardinal, and allowing complete substitutability among all levels of achievement. In order to isolate and scrutini...

The Human Development Index, which is multidimensional by construction, is criticized on the ground that it is insensitive to any form of inequality across persons. Inequality in the multidimensional context can take two distinct forms. The first pertains to the spread of the distribution across persons, analogous to unidimensional inequality. The...

In this paper, we propose a new multidimensional inequality index that satisfies a fundamental set of desired properties. We discuss the case where the social evaluation function of welfare depends simultaneously on unidimensional and multidimensional forms of inequality. We show how this mixed social norm interferes with the most popular axioms co...

This paper focuses on the methodology by which India’s 2002 Below the Poverty Line (BPL) census data identify the poor and construct a BPL headcount. Using the BPL 2002 methodology and NFHS (National Family Health Survey) data, it identifies which rural families would have been considered BPL were NFHS (National Family Health Survey) data used. It...

This paper examines the role of privatization on the cost of government-provided services. We examine data on the cost of housing public and private prisoners from all 50 states over the time period 1996-2004, and find that the existence of private prisons in a state reduces the growth in per prisoner expenditures by public prisons by a statistical...