Data to Measure Multidimensional Poverty: The Work Dimension

Poverty and work–related deprivations

Employment stands as an intrinsic element of wellbeing, requiring little justification. Its significance lies in shaping various crucial facets of individuals’ lives and those of their families, both directly and indirectly. Most importantly, work serves as the primary means through which households secure a livelihood, providing income to meet their present and future needs, whether basic or non-basic.

Beyond the monetary aspect, however, work profoundly (re)shapes people’s lives. For many employees, their jobs offer a sense of achievement, personal fulfilment, and increased self–esteem. The workplace, whether physical or virtual, fosters social interaction and connectedness, extending its impact on the worker’s entire household. It acts as a platform for skill and personal development, promoting growth on both professional and personal fronts. A job can also become integral to one’s identity, shaping individual social status and recognition. Moreover, work increasingly plays a role in determining an individual’s health and overall wellbeing by influencing how they structure their time and activities, once again affecting various aspects of the entire household.

Thus, the absence of a good job is a natural aspect of multidimensional poverty, understood as the experience of multiple overlapping deprivations.

Acknowledging that human development involves expanding the freedoms people value and have reason to value, various international development agendas focus on identifying the absence of good jobs in society and enhancing working conditions for all.

 

Current operationalisations of the work dimension

In the most influential current international development agenda – the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – job quantity and quality are fully present in SDG 8. This arguably offers one good starting point to think about a globally accepted operationalisation of a work dimension in a multidimensional poverty measure. Importantly, not all the indicators in SDG 8 can effectively inform a multidimensional measure. This is mainly because they are related to the assessment of aggregate macroeconomic performance, financial depth, or the environmental hazards that may come along with GDP growth (and job creation).

Many other indicators in SDG 8, however, are indeed quite useful to inform a measure of multidimensional poverty. They reflect notions of what public policy could consider poor, unacceptable, or inadequate working conditions, which should be addressed by specific programmes. These indicators include low wages, precarious working conditions, limited access to benefits from work, and violation of legal rights. They call for a disaggregated appraisal of the workers’ situation, urging analysts to make a difference between adult workers, child labour, and employed youth. Importantly, SDG 8 also urges that policy actors account for within-country heterogeneity in terms of sex, economic sector, disability status and migrant status, among others.

Although there is not a perfect match, indicators similar to the ones in SDG 8 have been included in many official national MPIs. Each of the indicators is defined differently for different countries to correctly reflect national priorities, but they help make the case that a consensus around some core indicators may be possible.

When considering an internationally comparable measure of poverty compatible with the indicators and targets of the 2030 Agenda, the work dimension should provide enough information on the following domains:

i). Job availability (SDG 8.5.2) is a domain that primarily focuses on capturing unemployment or underemployment status.

ii). Monetary compensation (SDG 8.5.1), which refers to the worker’s salary.

iii). Stability (SDG 8.3.1), which aims to gauge the continuity of all benefits (monetary and non-monetary) that come with a job.

iv). Working conditions (8.8.1), which is concerned with the working environment in general.

v). Benefits from work (SDG 8.8.2), which broadly focuses on access to all labour rights by national laws.

vi). Child labour (SDG 8.7.1), which helps detect situations of forced labour or even forms of slavery.

 

Towards a practical questionnaire: Some basic considerations

Arriving at an adequate empirical operationalisation of the indicators discussed above is not an easy task. Importantly, countries, international agencies and organisations of civil society wishing to incorporate a work dimension into a meaningful multidimensional measure will have to revise existing survey questionnaires – or create new ones, provided that they can be stable over time. If this is the case, at least two basic principles should be considered.

First is parsimony. When including questions relevant to the work dimension, one has to keep in mind that these represent only a subsection of a more complex survey that is not necessarily focused on working conditions but intends to capture several living conditions – thus respecting the notion of multidimensional poverty.

Second is proven adequacy in the field. It may be tempting to just borrow questions from other surveys and adapt them to the local context. Indeed, there are some widespread consensual ways of creating work –related indicators worldwide. However, one also has to keep in mind that every new questionnaire needs to be validated within the reality of each country, particularly in areas where the poor live.

Ideally and whenever possible, work-related questions should be asked to all household members aged five and above. The reason is that working conditions for each household member naturally vary widely within the household, and the indicators need to take this heterogeneity into account. The lower age bound of five years is useful to detect any form of child labour.

However, the ideal that each person should respond about their own working conditions may be too costly and highly impractical. In this case, the respondent could be the head of the household, but it should be considered that this second-best option may increase measurement error, response inaccuracy, and/or the amount of missing information.

Besides the lower bound of five years for the applicability of the questionnaire, the following age ranges must be considered for analytical purposes.

Regularly, youth not in education, employment, or training (NEET) is a subset of the population aged 15–29 years old. The age of retirement is regularly around 65 years of age. It may be useful to consider workers who are still active after the age of retirement to denote some deprivations in the household.

Finally, the questionnaire should allow for the performance of some basic disaggregation as per the SDG 8 framework. These include sex, migrant status, disability status, age, occupation, and economic sector. This can be considered as a lower-bound set of useful disaggregation, which can be supplemented by questions for other sections of the overall questionnaire.

 

 

This article was published in Dimensions 16