Multidimensional Poverty Orderings

This chapter generalizes the poverty ordering criteria available for single dimensional income poverty to the case of multidimensional welfare attributes. It discusses a set of properties to be satisfied by multidimensional poverty measures. It then defines general classes of poverty measures based on these properties. Finally, dominance criteria are derived such that a distribution of multidimensional attributes exhibits less poverty than another for all multidimensional poverty indices belonging to a given class. These criteria may be seen as a generalization of the single dimensional povertyline criterion. However, it turns out that the way this generalization is made depends on whether attributes are complements or substitutes.