From income poverty to multidimensional poverty—an international comparison

Abstract

"Proponents of the income-based approach to poverty rarely contest the fact that poverty is actually a multidimensional phenomenon. What they claim is that economic resources provide a sufficiently precise proxy for whatever dimensions poverty might have. The indirect assumption is that all dimensions of poverty are highly correlated and thus can be substituted by just one dimension: income. Upcoming multidimensional poverty measures have challenged this established assumption, claiming that the correlation between the various dimensions of poverty is in fact not strong enough for income to serve as a proxy for them. Instead, the multiple dimensions of poverty should be measured one by one". (...)