Sub-national disparities and inter-temporal evolution of multidimensional poverty across developing countries: OPHI research in progress 32a

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). A number of updates and innovative analyses have been introduced in 2011 as explained in Alkire et al. (2011). This paper focuses on the new analyses of sub-national decompositions and changes over time. It analyses the incidence, intensity and composition of multidimensional poverty at sub-national levels for 66 developing countries, and presents poverty estimates for 683 sub-national regions which cover 1.4 billion of the 1.65 billion MPI poor people identified by the MPI in 2011. The results show wide within-country disparities in poverty levels across geographical regions and across low-income and lower-middle-income countries. It confirms previous research which shows that even though the incidence of poverty in low-income countries is much higher, a larger number of poor people live in middle-income countries. In addition, it shows that the poorest sub-national regions of middle-income countries are no less poor than the low-income countries as a whole. In fact, there are also a larger number of severely poor people in middle-income countries than in low-income countries. The paper then further investigates the composition of poverty by analysing which indicators are major contributors to the MPI in each sub-national region. It identifies eleven “poverty profiles” across regions and finds striking examples of regions that have similar compositions but different MPI levels as well as regions with different compositions and similar MPI levels. Finally, the paper analyses changes over time for ten countries and their 158 sub-national regions for which we have comparable data across two different periods of time, providing information regarding the reduction of each indicator within each region. While poverty went down in all countries, the ten countries differ in terms of the rate, spatial patterns, relative reduction of incidence or intensity, and the indicators in which poverty was reduced.Copyright © Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative 2011. Preliminary Draft released as Research In Progress. Not for Citation without Permission