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Currently, Malaysia uses the Poverty Line Income (PLI) to measure poverty. This is because income measurement is the easiest way to collect data, but in its simplicity, it fails to capture the broader meaning and implications of poverty. Asset index is one of the non-monetary poverty measurements which have been established by researchers but not used in measuring poverty in Malaysia. A household might be poor in income, but assets may prevent them from being trapped in poverty.

This study will reassess the poverty of 302 households in the Northern States of Malaysia using the asset index and also the current state of poverty incidence with change under asset index.

The results show that households in the Northern States of Malaysia are interpreted as being ‘poorer’ when poverty is measured using assets as opposed to income alone. Besides that, poverty incidence of Malay households, households living in urban area and households with middle-aged heads have high poverty incidence, while households with a head of households that is single and highly educated have low poverty incidence. The logistic regression analysis shows that the determinants of poverty incidence based on the asset index are Indian, Penang and Perak State, the age of the head of household, distance to the education centre from home.

This study shows the asset index measurement which have not been done in Malaysia. This will contribute to the improvement of poverty measurement of the country.

Outlines a method for controlling for compositional factors in the measurement of poverty. Bases the method on “shift‐share analysis” and “direct standardization”, consistent with Sen’s (1976) influential axiomatic approach to poverty measurement. Employs the popular poverty index proposed by Foster et al. (1984), which is one of the few summary poverty measures that can be directly standardized and also meets Sen’s criteria. The method is illustrated by examining the trend in absolute and relative poverty in the UK. Uses data from the “Family Expenditure Survey”, covering the period 1968 to 1986, and places specific empirical focus on the relationship between household structure and poverty.

A number of multidimensional poverty measures that respect the ordinal nature of dimensions have recently been proposed within the counting approach framework. Besides ensuring a reduction in poverty, however, it is important to monitor distributional changes to ensure that poverty reduction has been inclusive in reaching the poorest. Distributional issues are typically captured by adjusting a poverty measure to be sensitive to inequality among the poor. This approach, however, has certain practical and conceptual limitations. It conflicts, for example, with some policy-relevant measurement features, such as the ability to decompose a measure into dimensions post-identification and does not create an appropriate framework for assessing disparity in poverty across population subgroups. In this chapter, we propose and justify the use of a separate decomposable inequality measure – a positive multiple of “variance” – to capture the distribution of deprivations among the poor and to assess disparity in poverty across population subgroups. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach through two contrasting inter-temporal illustrations using Demographic Health Survey data sets for Haiti and India.

Comprehensive poverty measures are increasingly gaining importance since people's deprivations and needs cover aspects beyond income. For this reason, the goal of this article is to propose a methodology to measure poverty that includes objective social deprivation, income deprivation and subjective social deprivation, using Mexico City and its municipalities as the study context. In order to show areas of intervention of public policies, the authors discuss the dimensions and indicators used in the multidimensional measurement.

Using the Social Welfare Survey (N = 2,871), the authors measure poverty with the Alkire-Foster methodology. The applied concept of poverty includes objective and subjective deprivations, and income.

The interaction between objective and subjective deprivations shows that income, social cohesion, built environment and public insecurity are important areas for the redesigning of public policies.

The employed method to measure poverty emphasizes the relevance of including subjective deprivations in interaction with objective deprivations and income. It evidences the need for the implementation or strengthening of public policies.

There has been a rapid expansion in the literature on the measurement of multidimensional poverty in recent years. This paper focuses on the longitudinal aspects of multidimensional poverty and its link to dynamic income poverty measurement. Using panel household survey data in Vietnam from 2007, 2008, and 2010, the paper analyses the prevalence and dynamics of both multidimensional and monetary poverty from the same dataset. The results show that the monetary poor (or non-poor) are not always multidimensionally poor (or non-poor) – indeed the overlap between the two measures is much less than 50 percent. Additionally, monetary poverty shows faster progress as well as a higher level of fluctuation than multidimensional poverty. We suggest that rapid economic growth as experienced by Vietnam has had a larger and more immediate impact on monetary than on multidimensional poverty.