TASKS:
1: It answers your question about how to edit the book.
2. It provides a different orientation about how to go about studying lives of the poor.
3. It provides the basis of a paper with title: Failures of the Invisible Hand, which could be written up for publication in the PDR.
Near Final Draft of Thesis submitted on 1 November 2011
AN INTER-TEMPORAL COMPARISON OF INTERNATIONAL POVERTY AS AN ACHIEVED FUNCTIONING DEPRIVATION
ABSTRACT
If poverty is much more than insufficient income or consumption and must be seen as associated with a failure to achieve certain desired outcomes with respect to health, nutrition, literacy, fulfilling social relations, economic and social freedom and possibly many other achieved functionings, then functioning deprivation is a more reliable indicator of the level of poverty in a society than income deprivation. Following Kakwani and Son (Kakwani & Son, 2006) we define poverty as a functioning failure caused by an inadequate command over market or nonmarket resources. We plan to identify nine basic functionings and corresponding indicators that best reflect these nine basic functionings and develop a functioning poverty index (FPI) to measure relative functioning poverty in 193 economies of the world. We plan to make an inter-temporal comparison of relative poverty between two periods 1990-2000 and 2001-2010.
We plan to also compare our estimates with the World Bank’s monetary measure of international poverty and UNDP’s HDI and HPI to see how they correlate. Our measure is though reductionist like HDI and HPI in its essence, it aims to present a picture of poverty which is more comprehensive than the one presented by World Bank’s unidimensional measure with its focus on mere monetary indicators or the UNDP’s multidimensional measures like Human Development Index (HDI) and Human Poverty Index (HPI) and Alkire and Santos’ Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) with their use of only three or four basic dimensions of wellbeing.
Subjective wellbeing, being one of the main objectives if not the ultimate goal of all human activity, could be a yardstick against which competing measures of wellbeing could be evaluated. This exercise could serve at least two purposes: measurement of the robustness of various measures of wellbeing and an insight into how the feelings of subjective wellbeing correlate with objective level of both unidimensional and multidimensional wellbeing. So we also plan to compare our estimates with Gallup’s “Life Satisfaction” which captures subjective wellbeing for 136 countries using Cantril ladder with scores ranging from 0 to 10 corresponding to complete dissatisfaction with life to total satisfaction