Crossposted from the Voices from Eurasia Blog by UNDP
Looking at the many dimensions of poverty, one can realise what a highly complex issue it is. The monetary perspective is just a start-off, there are also many other relevant areas such as health, acccess, location, environment, mobility, etc. Amartya Sen has done a groundbreaking work and much progress in recent decades to measure poverty. But one big problem persists: Poverty analysis is backwardly focused. To put it in blunt words, we can measure how it happened, but it is very difficult to measure it as it happens. Statistics are often months or even years old. When people apply for social welfare the personal crisis has already occurred. But how can the symptoms be measured before they even happen?
Such a new approach is to use real-time data (or big data) to measure poverty as it is happening. As we enter an era of massive data collection, thanks to the Internet and mobile devices, how could such data be also used to understand many dimensions of poverty? One...
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