If poverty means more than just the weight of a wallet, the world’s poor may be more numerous than previously believed. World Bank estimates put the population of global poor at 1.44 billion people””but a recent poverty index based on the work of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy, raises that number to 1.71 billion.
The differences lie in how poverty is measured. The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), published in July by researchers from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and Oxford University’s Poverty and Human Development Initiative, factors in living standards ranging from sanitation and the composition of household flooring (dirt, sand, or dung) to child mortality and years of schooling. The MPI asks how far a person has to walk for clean drinking water, while the World Bank’s measure is based solely on income, defining anyone who earns less than $1.25 a day as poor. By the World Bank standard, for example, only 39 percent of the population of Ethiopia would be considered poor; by MPI calculations, the figure is 90 percent. Conversely, 46 percent of Uzbekistan’s population would be classified as poor using the $1.25-a-day measure, but only 2 percent meet the criteria under the MPI. A change in how the poor are counted could vastly improve the effectiveness of international aid organizations as they allocate resources among impoverished people globally.