Vulnerability to Multidimensional Poverty: An Application to Colombian Households

This paper analyzes Colombian households’ vulnerability to multidimensional poverty. For this purpose, we apply the vulnerability as expected poverty approach and the multidimensional poverty index to obtain the probability of a household being poor in the future. The source of information was the Colombian Longitudinal Survey. By employing the Feasible Generalized Least Squares methodology in three stages, the results indicate that the percentage of vulnerable households is greater than the percentage of poor households. In addition, the pattern of vulnerability differs depending on the area (i.e., rural or urban) in which the households are located. These findings have important policy implications; specifically, they enable us to distinguish between groups of people that require particular policy strategies: households that are persistently poor require poverty alleviation interventions and those that are not poor, but have a high probability of becoming poor in the future, need poverty prevention strategies.