Casilda Lasso de la Vega, a professor at the University of the Basque Country, gave a seminar on how to measure poverty,  which was organized by the Navarra Center for International Development,  at the Institute for Culture and Society.

As an introduction, she described the 1976 work of Amartya Sen, in which she considers the methodology to be one of the most important elements. "Although in recent years there has been agreement on poverty as a multidimensional phenomenon, the focus provided by Sen should still be considered," said Casilda, adding that "cut off points should be established."

She indicated that the first cut off point involves identifying the poor within each dimension, while in the second step a minimum number of private dimensions is required for a person to be considered poor. "How we identify the poor does not matter; what really matters is how we group them," explained Professor Lasso de la Vega.

Indexes for measuring multidimensional poverty

The expert from the University of the Basque Country pointed out that many indexes to measure multidimensional poverty have been introduced, but only those which include cardinal variables produce good results – that is to say, those which have dimensions of a quantitative nature." However, much of the data available to measure the dimensions of poverty is categorical or ordinal," she said.

Professor Lasso de la Vega closed by presenting the curves of deprivation which were developed using an approach based on counting the number of deprivations suffered by the poor. The application of this methodology involves the selection of a minimum number of deprivations required for an individual to be identified as poor.

"Not only did the method provide a framework for measuring multidimensional poverty with categorical or ordinal data, but it also guaranteed a unanimous classification of counting vectors of deprivations when they are not crossed. In the instance that the curves do cross, the results would lead to conclusive verdicts", she concluded.