The Capabilities Based Multidimensional Poverty Determinant Analysis: Case Study from Turkey

Sen’s capability approach has been widely recognized for measuring well-being and poverty from a multidimensional perspective in the past three decades. With United Nations Development Programs, the capabilities approach has been operationalized based on poverty dashboards for different purposes such as Millennium development goals or most recently sustainable development goals, and also based on composite indices like the Human development and Multidimensional poverty indices. These measures have helped to see the life in the global south from a different angle focusing on non-monetary perspective to assess the quality of life. For long time, the evaluation process of living conditions in these developing countries were reduced to monetary basis. However, Sen showed that the life is not about the money but it is about the combinations of opportunities, resources, and means. Arguing the importance of Sen’s framework, in this study I shed light on education, health, dwelling, financial, and material well-being related capabilities in Turkey by using the 2011 Statistics on Income and living conditions survey. Based on different combinations of these capabilities captured in the data, I identify different groups of poverty such as the most prosperous, the most deprived and the in between of well-off and destitution. After this identification process, the regression based multivariate analysis shows the significance and magnitude of various socio-economic indicators on poverty groups. As a result, comparative analysis shows how different poverty groups are affected in a multidimensional perspective. This study, therefore, aims at better understanding the complex configurations of poverty and contributing to the development of new quality of life programs in Turkey.