“A Multidisciplinary Approach Is Essential for Understanding Poverty Dynamics and Economic Policies”

The Summer School 2024 at the UB School of Economics will focus on the global challenges in the 21st Century regarding the economics of poverty and inequality. Nicolai Suppa (Universitat de Barcelona and Oxford University) and Natalie Naïri Quinn (Oxford University) are experts in this field and will be the lecturers of our summer course, which will take place from July 1 to 5, 2024, at the University of Barcelona. We recently interviewed Nicolai Suppa, the Academic Coordinator of this year’s program, to learn more about the topics that participants will be able to explore at the Summer School.

1. What pivotal role do you see research on poverty and inequality playing in shaping economic policies and initiatives to address these pressing global challenges?

I would like to highlight two roles. First, the measurement of poverty and inequality itself already lies at the intersection of research and policy. For example, most countries have an official poverty measure for monitoring or targeting purposes. Research can improve these measures in several ways including (i) to better reflect the situation of people experiencing various forms hardships and (ii) to provide better incentives for policy makers by making successes and failures more visible.

Thereby, refined measures can help to strengthen both societal and political support for related policy programmes and ultimately increase efforts to tackle poverty.

Second, the available evidence in terms of socio-demographic patterns and trends over time requires both analyses and interpretation. Moreover, implemented anti-poverty programs need evaluation. Based on these insights, research on poverty and inequality can provide valuable policy advice.

2. Could you highlight some of the key insights and findings that participants can expect to gain from the program regarding the measurement and analysis of poverty and inequality, and how these insights can inform evidence-based policymaking?

One theme of the course is that both data and methods allows us to go beyond monetary aspects of poverty and inequality. Naturally, income and consumption levels remain highly relevant, but shortfalls and inequalities in other dimensions of human wellbeing such as health, education or social participation can now be considered, too.

For example, a session on inequalities in non-monetary dimensions will cover research on mortality differences and educational outcomes. We also offer several sessions on multidimensional poverty. By implication, this broadens the perspective for evidence-based policy making.

3. Considering the interdisciplinary nature of the topic, how does the program foster collaboration and exchange of ideas among participants with diverse academic backgrounds, and how does this contribute to a deeper understanding of poverty and inequality dynamics?

The interdisciplinary nature originates from several sources, including different social sciences working on the topic, the widely agreed multidimensional nature of well-being on poverty, and the fact that related measures are situated between research and policy. All these aspects attract interest from different perspectives.
The course seeks to provide a broad introduction into the topic in the sense that sessions range from more conceptual material like the capability approach (a philosophical framework to study human well-being), to more mathematical sessions on the measurement of poverty and inequality, to more empirical-oriented sessions where we discuss analyses of global poverty or program evaluation.

By covering this range of topics, the course seeks to provide a common denominator for people working on these topics, which then may eventually encourage more integrated research on these topics. For instance, each subfield has their own technical terms, considers different questions to be relevant, and is concerned with specific methodological shortcomings.

A common language and awareness of problems, methodological issues, and standards, which vary with disciplines and sub-fields, would help to better relate and align the different research efforts. A more integrated research would then, for example, account for the communicational needs on the policy side already in the construction of a measure.

4. In your view, what are some of the most pressing research gaps or emerging trends in the field of poverty and inequality, and how does the program aim to address these areas to equip participants with relevant skills and knowledge?

A common thread in research on poverty and inequality is that the available data is really constraining analyses. For example, intra-household inequalities are considered to be important, but not easy to study at a large scale due to insufficient details in our data.

Related research, therefore, often seeks to address data gaps (which may arise for various reasons) using statistical techniques, such as imputations or pseudo panel analysis. Sometimes combining different data sources is an option, too (e.g., remote sensing data).

This issue illustrates that, besides a profound understanding of current practice in measurement and analysis, additional expertise from related fields (in this case statistics), is usually needed as well in order to address a highly relevant problem.

While the course introduces to the main methods, key results, popular data sources, and the larger lines of discussions, it will also present selected issues and challenges the related research facing. Depending on their background and individual skills, participants can then consider to address some of those challenges.

5. Beyond academic settings, how do you envision participants applying the learnings and skills acquired during the program to contribute meaningfully to societal efforts aimed at reducing poverty and inequality, both locally and globally?

As initially mentioned the field of poverty and inequality is situated between policy and research and thus acquired skills and insights can be easily applied outside academia.

For instance, technical expertise on constructing, updating and analysing poverty and inequality is needed in various statistical offices and other governmental agencies around the world. Related policy analyses may feature in reports of governmental or non-governmental organisations. Participants with strong communication skills can consider to contribute to the public debate on revising and improving poverty measures or discuss insights on related policy programmes.

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