Multidimensional Poverty Index for Middle Income Countries: Findings for Jordan, Iraq and Morocco

This paper portrays the situation of the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) in three Arab middle-income countries: Jordan, Iraq, and Morocco. This study is based on the Alkire-Foster methodology to calculate MPI published by UNDP Human Development Report 2010, and it introduces two additional poverty levels to capture less extreme levels of deprivation in health, education, and living conditions. These two levels of deprivation are designed to capture less severe poverty conditions, as observed in Arab countries.

Applying these measures to three middle-income Arab countries (Iraq, Jordan, and Morocco) shows the overall poverty ranking of the three countries is still preserved, but the differences in the spread of headcount poverty are significantly reduced. Our two additional proposed measures (MPI2 and MPI3) yield results that are significantly different from the global MPI. As such, they provide us with a more comprehensive view of the spread of multidimensional poverty. The paper has also undertaken several exercises to check for the robustness of our main results. We found that poverty rates are robust to household wealth, place of residence (rural versus urban), and size.

Issuance Date

Find out more