Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Institute of Statistical Studies and Research - Department of Biostatistics and Demography

The aim of this study is to examine the significance of adding more dimensions to the global multidimensional poverty Index (MPI). The global MPI consists mainly of three dimensions health, education, and standard of living. the key objective of this study is to develop the MPI by integrating other missing dimensions in poverty data that the literature found of great importance. The proposed development of the index should result in better understanding of the poverty phenomenon, a more comprehensive approach of identifying the poor and that in turn results in much informed decisions from the policy makers. The process of developing the index involved many stages, starting with investigating and identifying the missing dimensions that should be incorporated to the MPI, selections of the indicators, turning indicators into deprivations among others, calculation of the indices, and finishing with the robustness and sensitivity analysis tests to ensure the validity and robustness of the newly developed index. In pursue of the study objective, the researcher used the survey of young people in Egypt (SYPE) 2009 data, since SYPE data includes modules that cover the main dimensions of the MPI in addition to the newly proposed dimensions. Primarily two versions of the global MPI was calculated, the first version uses the three main dimensions of the global MPI namely, health, education and standard of living while the second version combines the three main dimensions in addition to the four newly proposed ones. Robustness and sensitivity analysis tests were performed on the different versions of the MPI, that included (correlations coefficients, standard errors, and confidence intervals), in addition to other descriptive analysis. These tests validated that the usage of the developed version of the MPI is better in identifying the poor than the original version of the MPI

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