EPFO EO/AO 2023 General Ability Test · Question 59 of 120

Correct — A, (a) 1, 2, 3 and 4. Every one of the four items listed is an indicator of the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, so nothing has to be excluded. The index measures poverty as a bundle of deprivations rather than as a shortfall of income. It has three dimensions, weighted equally at one-third each, and ten indicators distributed among them. Health carries two indicators, nutrition and child mortality, at one-sixth each. Education carries two, years of schooling and school attendance, again at one-sixth each. Standard of living carries six — cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets — at one-eighteenth each, so that the six together make up the same one-third as the two indicators in either of the other dimensions. Place the question's four items in that scheme and the answer follows. Nutrition is a health indicator; school attendance is an education indicator; cooking fuel and assets are two of the six standard-of-living indicators. All four are in, and the option that includes all four is the answer. How the index is computed is worth knowing alongside the list, because it explains why such homely things as a cooking fuel or a household's possessions belong in a poverty measure at all. A household's deprivations are added up with those weights to give a deprivation score, and a person is identified as multidimensionally poor if the score reaches one-third — that is, if the household is deprived in at least a third of the weighted indicators. The index itself is then the product of two numbers: the headcount ratio, meaning the share of people who are poor, and the intensity, meaning the average share of weighted deprivations that poor people suffer. Multiplying them means the measure falls when fewer people are poor AND when those who remain poor are deprived in fewer respects, which an income poverty line cannot register. One clarification on the stem, which does not affect the answer: the Global MPI is produced jointly by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the United Nations Development Programme, and has been published in the Human Development Report since 2010, when it replaced the earlier Human Poverty Index.

• (b)1, 2 and 3 only — It keeps nutrition, cooking fuel and assets and drops school attendance, which is one of the two education indicators and carries a full one-sixth weight — more than either of the two items from the standard-of-living dimension that this option retains. The exclusion has no basis: the Global MPI has always measured education through years of schooling and school attendance, the first asking whether any household member has completed a minimum number of years of schooling and the second whether school-aged children are attending.
• (c)2, 3 and 4 only — It drops nutrition, which is not merely an indicator of the index but one of the two indicators of its health dimension and, with child mortality, one of the two heaviest-weighted items in the whole scheme. A candidate may exclude it on the reasoning that nutrition sounds like a health outcome rather than a poverty measure — which is exactly the reasoning the multidimensional approach was designed to reject, since being unable to feed a household adequately is a deprivation in its own right.
• (d)1 and 4 only — The most internally consistent wrong answer, and therefore the most instructive. It keeps precisely the health indicator and the education indicator and discards both standard-of-living items, as though the index measured only outcomes in health and education and not the material conditions of the household. In fact six of the ten indicators belong to the standard-of-living dimension, cooking fuel and assets among them, and they collectively carry as much weight as health or education. An option built on a tidy principle is not thereby right.

The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index applies the Alkire-Foster method to household survey data and identifies the poor by their overlapping deprivations rather than by their income. Its ten indicators are: nutrition and child mortality under health; years of schooling and school attendance under education; and cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets under standard of living. The three dimensions are equally weighted, so each health and education indicator carries one-sixth and each standard-of-living indicator one-eighteenth. A cut-off of one-third of the weighted indicators identifies a person as MPI poor, and the index is the headcount ratio multiplied by the intensity of deprivation among the poor. It was developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative together with the United Nations Development Programme and first appeared in the Human Development Report for 2010, replacing the Human Poverty Index that the 1997 Report had introduced. India runs a national version through NITI Aayog, built on National Family Health Survey data, which keeps the same three dimensions but uses twelve indicators, adding maternal health to the health dimension and a bank account to the standard-of-living dimension.

The economy and governance block of this paper regularly asks about a published index — who produces it, what it measures, and which components belong to it. Questions of this shape reward knowing a list exactly rather than in outline, because the wrong options are made by dropping real components rather than by adding invented ones. The habit to build is to attach each index to its producing body, its year of first publication, its dimensions and, where the list is short enough, its indicators; for the Global MPI all four of those are examinable and the indicator list is the one most often tested.

• The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index has three equally weighted dimensions — health, education and standard of living — and ten indicators.
• Health indicators: nutrition and child mortality, one-sixth weight each.
• Education indicators: years of schooling and school attendance, one-sixth weight each.
• Standard of living indicators: cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets, one-eighteenth weight each.
• A person is identified as multidimensionally poor if the weighted deprivation score reaches one-third.
• The index equals the headcount ratio multiplied by the intensity of deprivation among the poor.
• It is produced by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative with the United Nations Development Programme, and has appeared in the Human Development Report since 2010.
• It replaced the Human Poverty Index, which had been introduced in the Human Development Report of 1997.
• India's National MPI, published by NITI Aayog, uses the same three dimensions with twelve indicators, adding maternal health and a bank account.

• Assuming a poverty index must be about income or consumption alone.
• Dropping the standard-of-living indicators as too specific, when six of the ten belong to that dimension.
• Attributing the Global MPI to the United Nations Development Programme alone, when it is produced jointly with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative.
• Confusing the Global MPI's ten indicators with the National MPI's twelve.

Index questions in EO/AO papers ask for the publishing body, the dimensions, the components, or a comparison between two indices. The safest preparation is a single table of the major indices — producer, first year, dimensions and number of indicators — covering the Human Development Index, the Global MPI, the National MPI, the Global Hunger Index and the Gender Inequality Index, since the same handful is asked in rotation.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index measures poverty across how many dimensions and indicators respectively ?

  • (a)Two dimensions and eight indicators
  • (b)Three dimensions and ten indicators
  • (c)Three dimensions and twelve indicators
  • (d)Four dimensions and ten indicators

  Answer(b) Three dimensions and ten indicators

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, a person is identified as multidimensionally poor when the weighted deprivation score is at least :

  • (a)One-tenth
  • (b)One-sixth
  • (c)One-third
  • (d)One-half

  Answer(c) One-third