UBN-PL Method

The United Nation’s Economic Commission for Latin America and Caribbean (ECLAC) developed and raised the concept of unmet basic needs (UBN) as indicators of poverty for the region in the late 1970s. Most Latin American countries adopted this approach in the 1980s. Julio Boltvinik first suggested a conceptual approach in 1989, following an analysis introduced by Luis Beccaria and Alberto Minujin for overcoming poverty. Other researchers gave region-wide maps of UBN for overcoming poverty in a given region. Under the UBN, any household is considered poor if it cannot access basic necessities, including proper housing (without critical overcrowding and inadequate services), hygienic food and clean water, basic education, and health facilities. The availability of data determines which goods and services are included in the UBN. One of the criticisms of the UBN method is that the poverty rate depends upon the number of categories included as basic needs. If the number of goods and services increase under basic needs, it is more likely for a household to fail to access the minimum standards.

Not all variants of the UBN methods identify poor households and individuals. There are two variants that rank geographical areas. In both variants, a minimum threshold is defined in each need analyzed, and the proportion of population below that threshold is counted for each area. The social indicators follow this format, and this traditional method is used in social analysis. Each social need is separately analyzed, and the analyst prepares a list of partial gaps for each geographical level. This is known as the fragmented sectorial (FS) variant. The World Bank’s report and the UNDP’s “Human Development Reports” are examples of UBN-FS. Following this approach, social planning and sectorial analysis and planning can be effectively done. However, it fails to calculate a unified target population because it handles only specified target households. The next variant, the UBN area-integrated sectorial (AIS) variant synthesizes all the indicators for each geographical area into one composite index. The National Council for Population (CONAPO) is an example of this approach. Because the UBN-AIS provides numerals, it is useful in ranking geographical areas.

The other methodologies are derived from the UBN-FS and UBN-AIS. They are the restricted original (RO), restricted improved (RI), generalized original (GO), generalized improved (GI), and human poverty index (HPI). The methodologies that apply to individuals and households are divided into restricted and generalized methods. The general indicators capture all dimensions of poverty, whereas restricted comprises [Page 1568]few indicators. The UBN-RO has been extensively used in Latin America for building poverty maps. However, it does not allow estimation of the poverty gap or poverty intensity. The UBN-RI presents a procedure that includes people’s views on the level of satisfaction to estimate and decide who is poor. The UBN-RI, unlike the UBN-AIS, includes households instead of geographical areas. In order to overcome the limitations of the UBN-GO and to generalize this approach, various attempts have been made. The concept of “enforced lack” was proposed in 1985. Meghnad Desai and Anup Shah proposed to measure each household for constructing poverty indices. Amartya Sen proposed the capability-functioning approach; and finally, HPI has been included in the UBN.

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