BEYOND INCOME: ANALYSIS OF MULTIDIMENSIONAL POVERTY IN BRAZIL

Being developed since 2010 by the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative in accordance with the new international analytical paradigm on the phenomenon of poverty, the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) has been adopted by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). The methodology used in this study is based on Alkire and Foster (2011), and analyses the incidence and intensity of poverty, i.e. the percentage of poor individuals and the average distance separating them from the situation of non-poverty. The paper’s purpose is to apply the MPI to the Brazilian case, using the National Household Sample Survey produced by the IBGE in the years 2002, 2007, 2912, and 2013. The results obtained indicate that the MPI in Brazil is of 6.97% in 2002 and comes to an index of 1.93% in 2013, indicating a decreasing tendency along the period encompassed by the study.

Multidimensional Poverty; Incidence; Intensity; Index; Brazil