A New Extension of Bourguignon and Chakravarty Index to Measure Educational Poverty and Its Application to the OECD Countries

The consequences that educational underperformance has on both individuals and society as a whole lead policy makers and planners to focus on how to measure it properly. The aim of this paper is to propose an index to measure educational poverty which, taking as a starting point the economic literature on multidimensional poverty measurement, turns out to be appropriate in the educational context. With this purpose, the following two features are demanded: (1) an individual should be identified as poor whenever they do not reach the basic level of knowledge in at least one of the relevant subjects; (2) the degree of poverty of individuals who present the same level of insufficiency in some subjects but have different scores in others should be different. Based on these premises, we introduce a multidimensional adjusted poverty index, called BCª index, which is an extension of Bourguignon and Chakravarty index, and we apply it to measure educational poverty in the OECD countries by using data from PISA 2012 and 2015 reports.