Partial Order based Visual Representation of Poverty in Argentina

Poverty analysis constitutes a major challenge social policy design. The standard approach has focused on income thresholds based on baskets of basic goods. This approach enables tracking poverty but does not shed light on its multidimensional structure. On the other hand, the ordinal nature of the indicators of different dimensions of poverty makes it difficult to merge them into more general descriptors. The compensatory property of the aggregation functions hides important aspects of the poverty phenomenon that are relevant for policy design. In this article we analyse the structure of poverty by means of a novel visualization method that fully respects the ordinal nature of poverty indicators. We apply the method to the case of Buenos Aires metropolitan area, by comparing the central federal district to the suburbs. The poverty structure in the centre is mainly characterised by single aspect deprivation, whereas it is more complex in the suburbs, involving different combinations of services deprivation with education, labour, and housing deprivation.