“How do you indentify the poor?” This is how Casilda Lasso de la Vega from the Universidad del Pais Vasco began her presentation at the NCID weekly seminar. She discussed many previous studies of poverty including Amartya Sen’s 1976 seminal paper in which methodology and aggregative measurements are considered to be the most important elements to measure poverty.

“Even though in recent times there is considerable agreement that poverty is a multidimensional phenomenon, the approach suggested by Sen should still be followed”, Casilda urged, adding that “now, two cutoffs should be established”. The first of them has to do with the traditional identification of the poor within each dimension by using a dimension-specific poverty line. In the second step, a minimum number of deprived dimensions is required for one to be considered poor. “How we identify the poor does not matter…what matters is how we are going to aggregate them” quipped Casilda. There are many indices that have been introduced for the measurement of multidimensional poverty. However, only those that include cardinal variables behave well, that is those with dimensions that are quantitative in nature. Yet, most of the data available to measure dimensions of poverty are either ordinal or categorical.

She finished her presentation by showing deprivation curves developed using a counting approach based on the number of deprivations suffered by the poor. Not only did the method provide an appropriate framework for measuring multidimensional poverty with ordinal or categorical data but also it guaranteed the unanimous ranking of vectors of deprivation counts when they do not intersect. In the event that the curves intersected, additional results were derived that led to conclusive verdicts. The implementation of this methodology involved a choice of a minimum number of deprivations required in order for an individual to be identified as poor.