International and national experts will gather at ECLAC headquarters in Santiago on March 4-5 to analyse proposals for measuring poverty from a multidimensional perspective and study their empirical application in countries of the region.

The International Seminar “Multidimensional Poverty Measurement in Latin America” is organized by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the Ministry of Planning and Cooperation of Chile, the Foundation for Overcoming Poverty and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).

Measuring poverty in a multidimensional approach has become increasingly important in recent years due to the emergence of new conceptual frameworks, such as defining poverty from a rights or a human development perspective. Under this new conception of public policies, poverty is defined not only as the insatisfaction of basic needs, but also and above all, as the deprivation of capabilities, the loss of freedom and the denial of citizenship, understood as lacking access to fundamental rights.

In general, multidimensional poverty measurement requires: a) selecting the dimensions of well-being to be included, b) defining minimum thresholds for each of these dimensions, and c) aggregating these different dimensions in synthetic index. The first two steps are essential, because they imply determining the basic guarantees needed for an adequate participation in society.

However, there may not be “a solution” that can be applied in every context for selecting dimensions and thresholds, and this has to do with the ambiguity of the meaning of rights and primarily with the economic cost of their provision.

Aggregating the different dimensions in a synthetic index meets with the problem of comparability among the different distributions of well-being. The combination rules of the different dimensions must be defined in order to estimate the cutoffs and differentiate, multi-dimensionally, the poor from the non-poor. For example, some may consider more important to establish if people are being deprived of income, access to health or education, while others will be more interested in establishing if people are being deprived of these same things simultaneously.

Over recent years, numerous methodologies for deriving multidimensional poverty indexes have been suggested. The most recent approximations have been based on the compliance of a set of desirable properties, or axioms.

For example, Alkire and Foster (2007) developed a method for multidimensional poverty measurement based on extending the axioms traditionally used in the field of monetary metrics (particularly those applied in FGT measurements) to non-monetary fields. This method complies with the basic axioms, allows different pondering schemes and facilitates the definition of cutoffs taking into account the severity and amount of deprivations and may be used with quantitative and qualitative variables.

In addition, the interest in multidimensional poverty measurement has led to analysing the feasibility of including indicators of the “lost dimensions” of poverty, such as subjective aspects like empowerment, perceptions of insecurity and violence and the capacity of feeling dignified and respected by others 1 . It is open to discussion whether these subjective measurements are really dimensions of poverty. Additionally, the problems of the availability, quality and comparability of data must be tackled.

The international seminar will deal with these and related issues, as well as the potential challenges of implementing multidimensional measurements and the steps to address them.

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1 See OPHI website (Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative),
http://www.ophi.org.uk/subindex.php?id=publications0