The impact of education and training on a multidimensional measure of social exclusion
Description and objectives of the research
Social exclusion is inherently multidimensional, as is well documented in the various writings by Nobel prize recipient Amartya Sen. Sen defined ‘poverty’ in terms of deprivation of capability or opportunities. Various other papers written since the late 90s outline attractive conceptual concepts of multidimensional poverty. However, empirical implementation of these measures has proved relatively unsatisfactory and difficult as they often require cardinal data while many aspects of poverty that are of interest are ordinal or categorical, or in practise do not work well if the number of dimensions increase.
The most recent work on multidimensional poverty and exclusion is Scutella et al. (2009) in which the authors construct a measure of social exclusion that takes account of seven key dimensions contributing to exclusion: material resources; labour market outcomes; education and training; health; social interactions; community participation; and personal safety. The framework used builds on earlier work by Headey (2006) and Saunders et al. (2007) for Australia, and is strongly influenced by recent international work on social exclusion; including Burchardt et al. (2002), Atkinson et al. (2002) and Levitas et al. (2007).
This study will extend this earlier work by further developing the Scutella et al. (2009) measure of social exclusion to take account of recent advances in the poverty measurement literature as proposed by Alkire and Foster (2009), by examining the persistence of social exclusion over time, and finally by using this measure to examine the extent to which low levels of education and training, in particular the lack of tertiary education qualifications, contribute to social exclusion.
Contact: The Melbourne Institute contacts for this project are Dr Rosanna Scutella and Dr Hielke Buddelmeyer.
Progress: This project commenced in March 2011 with a final report submitted to the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) in early 2012.