Macro-level Drivers of Multidimensional Poverty in Developing Countries: Measuring Change in the Human Poverty Index.

摘要

Poverty is increasingly recognized as a multidimensional phenomenon in the development literature, encompassing not only income, but also a range of factors related to broadening an individual's freedoms to live a life of her own choosing. Poverty so understood suggests that alternative approaches to poverty measurement reflecting this multidimensionality may point toward alternative policies for poverty alleviation.;This study explores the factors that may account for changes in one metric of multidimensional poverty in developing countries, the United Nation Development Program's Human Poverty Index, and will be primarily concerned with measuring the effects on the HPI of policies and activities that relate to, or are explicitly meant to encourage, economic growth, increased literacy and improved health, and asset development.;The study focuses on the outcomes of a panel data set, created for the purpose of this study, of HPI scores for a set of 108 developing countries, between 1998 and 2007, and a range of indicators that the development literature and theory suggest should have an effect on income poverty, asking, what is the relationship between these indicators and multidimensional poverty?;A parallel set of models has been developed to measure the response of household consumption expenditure to changes in economic growth, human capabilities and asset development indicators.;All models are estimated using two-way fixed effects estimators and cluster robust standard errors in Stata 10.;Consistent with the development literature, household expenditure appears to be significantly and positively related to changes in GDP per capita. However, when the HPI is regressed on GDP per capita, no statistically significant relationship is observed, even when controlling for a range of other indicators, suggesting that economic growth has no bearing on multidimensional poverty in most parts of the developing world. This finding suggests that development policies that focus primarily on economic growth as a means to addressing multidimensional deprivation may be misplaced.