Network Structure of Multidimensional Poverty

Poverty is multidimensional. An individual or household experiencing poverty can suffer multiple disadvantages at the same time. Beyond the inability to afford basic needs, poverty can also mean insufficient access to education, health, sanitation, nutrition, and infrastructure.

Measuring multidimensional poverty offers a more comprehensive view of the challenges people face when experiencing poverty, and thus helps inform policy approaches countries can take to address these challenges.

However, despite progress in multidimensional poverty measurement, policy remains fragmented due to limited understanding of how poverty indicators interconnect and co-evolve.

New research aims to address this challenge by introducing the Poverty Space network and the Poverty Centrality measure.

• The Poverty Space network is a visual representation that maps out the structural relationships between various dimensions of poverty, and helps to see how different aspects of deprivation are interconnected.
• The Poverty Centrality measure helps assess the importance of each dimension for the purpose of policy intervention.

Using data from the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative/UNDP Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, researchers have developed charts for 67 developing countries to illustrate these concepts. The dashboard below can be used to visualize the Poverty Space of a country in a given year and download the relevant data used to construct this visualization.