CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Aclaracion: este trabajo no tiene abstract pues se trata de la Introduccion a un volumen especial de la revista. Sin embargo, los siguientes dos parrafos del texto pueden tomarse como resumen de la introduccion. This special issue comprises a set of nine papers that utilise the AF methodology. Their preliminary versions were presented at an OPHI workshop in June 2009 on Multidimensional Measures in Six Contexts. Six papers present multidimensional poverty estimates in different developing regions of the world, with three of them focusing oncertain unprivileged groups: poverty among women in Sub-Saharan Africa (14 countries), poverty among children in Afghanistan and in Bangladesh; and three providing poverty estimates in China, Bhutan, and Latin America (6 countries). Some of these papers analyze the evolution of poverty in these countries over time, or scrutinize poverty levels by population subgroups. The other three papers fit into the Beyond part of the title to this special issue, as they apply the AF methodology to topics other than poverty measurement. Two of the papers, illustrate the use of the AF methodology for targeting purposes and compare it against other currently-used methods. One studies the methodology used to identify and target the Below the Poverty Line households in India, and the other explores the targeting method for urban beneficiaries in the Oportunidades Program in Mexico. Finally, one paper uses the AF methodology to construct a governance index for African countries and compares the results with the Mo Ibrahim Index, upon whose indicators it draws. In this Introduction we set out the AF methodology used throughout this issue, define the terms that are common across papers, and highlight the advantages and limitations of this method. We also present other multidimensional poverty measures to which the AF measures are compared in some papers, namely, the Unsatisfied Basic Needs (UBN) Index and the family of Bourguignon and Chakravarty (2003) measures. We close with a succinct overview of each paper in this issue.