An alternative to Alkire and Foster’s framework for measuring multidimensional deprivation

This chapter presents an approach to measuring multidimensional deprivation, which is significantly different from the important approach of Alkire and Foster (2011) and Alkire et al. (2015) discussed in the previous chapter. This alternative approach, the basic features of which are to be found in earlier contributions of several writers including Tsui (2002), Bourguignon and Chakravarty (2003), Permanyer (2014, 2019), and Pattanaik and Xu (2018), starts with the intuition that an individual is deprived if and only if her well-being is “too low” and is based on the notions of an individual’s well-being function and a well-being benchmark to define what constitutes a “too low” level of individual well-being. We first present this alternative approach to the problem, then comment on the approach of Alkire and Foster (2011) and Alkire et al. (2015) and propose a variant of their approach.