Characterizing how to aggregate the individuals’ deprivations in a multidimensional framework

摘要

Most of the existing multidimensional poverty indices are constructed in two steps. First, the deprivation felt by each individual with respect to each attribute is computed. Then, these deprivations are aggregated to form a summary index of the overall deprivation. This paper explores properties for the aggregation stage and analyzes their implications. The axioms we propose are necessary and sufficient to characterize a procedure to aggregate the different individuals’ deprivations in order to measure the extent of deprivation in society.