Analyzing Multidimensional Well-Being

Chapter 5Poverty and Time: A Multidimensional Appraisal

5.1 Introduction

Our investigations on multidimensional poverty in Chapters 3 and 4 employ individual multidimensional achievements as inputs in a single period only. As a result, these atemporal studies do not convey us any information on the time span of poverty at the individual or society level. However, there are reasons not to regard poverty as a timeless concept, but to interpret it as a notion that undergoes evolution over time. It has a particular trajectory – a path with a past and a future. There are no reasons to expect that evolvement of income and nonincome dimensions of life will be the same over time (see Bourguignon and Morrison, 2002, and Decancq et al., 2006). If we restrict attention on each period of the trajectory independently of the past and future poverty experiences, then the assessment of the actual time path is ignored. In consequence, it becomes necessary to have knowledge on the durations and extents of poverty across persons. It has been stressed in the literature that continued periods of poverty are worse than scattered poverty occurrences over time (see Rodgers and Rodgers, 2003 and Jenkins, 2000). Prolonged poverty can be endemic if it arises because of political institutions and structure of the economy (Green and Hulme, 2005). A person, stricken by a long duration of poverty, may suffer from depression on finding that he is deprived even from “minimally acceptable levels” of one or ...