Abstract

Poverty is one of the obstacles that faces societies. In recent years, efforts have been made to fight the phenomenon of poverty in all its aspects and eliminate it by 2030 in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Poverty should not only be viewed from a monetary point of view, but the phenomenon should also describe the lack of access to services in health, education and many other aspects of life. Multidimensional poverty is one of the measures that express the phenomenon of poverty in terms of quality of life, such as lack of education, access to health services, access to electricity, quality of housing and other services that reflect quality of life. This paper discusses multidimensional poverty in Egypt using the household income, expenditure and consumption survey (HIECS 2015, 2017/2018 and 2019/2020). This provides data on many indicators useful for multidimensional poverty measurement and it measures household income and consumption. Monetary poverty and income sources diversification can thus be considered as an indicator in MPI or can be compared with MPI to assess the overlap and mismatch between the monetary and multidimensional poverty.
The paper will discuss the following: The first section will be an introduction to multidimensional poverty and how it describes poverty from all its aspects or dimensions. The second section will describe MPI's methodology for two scenarios. The first scenario includes the three main dimensions: education, health and standard of living, while the monetary poverty indicator will be added to the first scenario to become the second scenario.
The second section also discusses the pros and cons of adding monetary poverty as an indicator to the MPI. The third section will show the results of MPI across the three rounds 2015, 2017/2018 and 2019/2020, these results in details will be the MPI index, headcount ratio and intensity, Multidimensional poverty results will include a comprehensive picture of people living in poverty and allows for comparisons across regions and within governorates based on gender, urban or rural location, among other key household characteristics. In line with the SDGs, the Multidimensional Poverty Index would allow us to specifically target those suffering from poverty in all its different dimensions and provide them with the necessary support to achieve the poverty reduction target by 2030. The second aspect this paper focuses on is exploring a measure of inequality with a multidimensional approach using variance of inequality among poor and deprivation scores. In light of this, we try to assess how inequality varies for both scenarios based on the multidimensional poverty index. Finally, the conclusion that builds on the results of the previous chapter and some recommendations that can help policymakers to reduce poverty in all its aspects.