Axiomatic and Robust Multidimensional Poverty Measurements in five Southern Mediterranean Countries

The main goal of this chapter is to undertake a multidimensional poverty analysis in relation to five southern Mediterranean countries, namely Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey. We rely on a broader concept of poverty by considering the deprivations in women's educational attainments, the possession of durable goods and the consequences of housing conditions, each of which we operationalise by making use of recent developments in multidimensional poverty measurement. This analysis is based on an axiomatic approach to poverty and on the use of stochastic dominance tools to achieve robust results that do not hinge on the choice of poverty line and weighting scheme. Our findings provide comparisons over time for each country and between countries that cannot be obtained when each dimension of poverty is analysed separately, as the approaches take into account the correlations which may exist between different kinds of poverty. Furthermore, in contrast to rankings drawn from cardinal poverty measures (for example, from the Multidimensional Poverty Index), multidimensional tests make it possible to nuance the performance levels reached by certain countries.