A note on the weighting of the mexican social deprivation index

Abstract

In Mexico, multidimensional poverty measures incorporate indicators of income and social entitlements. For the latter, the Social Deprivation Index consists of an equally weighted sum of six dichotomous variables showing the deprivations suffered by each individual. In this paper, a principle component analysis is carried out in order to verify if the current index requires a statisticalmodification. Redundancy is detected among the variables associated with health services and housing services. We conclude that by redefining some of the variables included in the index and readjusting the weighting would help to significantly improve this measure of multidimensional poverty.