The current convey software does not include a measure of multidimensional poverty. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and Alkire and Foster (2011Alkire, Sabina, and James Foster. 2011. “Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Measurement.” Journal of Public Economics 95 (7-8): 476–87. https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/pubeco/v95y2011i7-8p476-487.html.) at Oxford University’s Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) have published reports and both Stata and R code based on the concepts proposed by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. Although we have not incorporated this work into our current R package, the example below defines a function and its related decomposition based on the Stata module by Pacifico and Poge (2016Pacifico, Daniele, and Felix Poge. 2016. “MPI: Stata Module to Compute the Alkire-Foster Multidimensional Poverty Measures and Their Decomposition by Deprivation Indicators and Population Sub-Groups.” http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boc:bocode:s458120.) and then replicates a presentation by OPHI Research Officer Christop Jindra.
This chapter presents two svyafc and svyafcdec functions as an initial R language implementation of multidimensional poverty measurement. We believe that feedback from users will help us improve this function in future versions of the R convey package. We kindly request your comments, criticism, use cases, and suggestions. We expect that multidimensional poverty measurement will become more popular as researchers focus more attention to this important area. With that in mind, we look forward to the feedback of readers like you.