UNDP and Oxford University Introduce New Tool for Tracking Poverty
Oxford and the UNDP have recently introduced a new and potentially revolutionary tool for assessing the level of poverty throughout the world. It is called the Multidimensional Poverty Index, or “MPI” for short.
The research paper on their site describes it thusly:
“The MPI assesses the nature and intensity of poverty at the individual level, with poor people being those who are multiply deprived and the extent of their poverty being measured by the extent of their deprivations.”
Basically, rather than measuring poverty solely in terms of income, it also measures and accounts for levels of access to critical resources such as education, healthcare, water, etc.
© 2010, Mark Wells. All rights reserved.
I haven’t had a chance to look all the way through the site, but I’m curious if anyone know how often their data is updated, how it is collected, and is the raw data accesible via an api somewhere?
Interesting I’m going to look into this. I’d like to know how the data is collected as well and how accessable it is. Let me know if you find anything additional info about this.
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“Basically, rather than measuring poverty solely in terms of income, it also measures and accounts for levels of access to critical resources such as education, healthcare, water, etc.”
Very interesting! Sounds like the more comprehensive concepts of Amartya Sen’s wellbeing are being put to practice.