Multidimensional Fuzzy Poverty and Pro-Poor Growth Measures in Nonmonetary Dimensions in Egypt Between 1995 and 2005

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to adopt a multidimensional approach to poverty that goes beyond focusing on a unidimensional measure of income or expenditure when attempting to ascertain the main aspects of the living conditions of households. In order to obtain multidimensional poverty measures the paper uses an approach based on fuzzy sets. This methodology is applied to data from the Demographic and Health Surveys for the years 1995 and 2005 in order to obtain an aggregated index of the Standard of Living for each household. The evolution of the Standard of Living of households between 1995 and 2005 as well as the uneven progress registered in the index of education as assessed by Egyptian HDR (2008) lead us to investigate the impact of non- income growth on poverty. Thus, following the study of Grosse et al. (2008), extended growth incidence curves (Ravallion and Chen, 2003) are applied to the index of the Standard of Living and to education in order to assess if progress has been biased in favour of the poor.