Measuring poverty in multidimensional contexts

When measuring multidimensional poverty it is reasonable to expect that the trade-offs between variable pairs can differ depending on whether the concerned pairs are complements or substitutes. Yet, currently existing approaches based on deprivation count distributions unrealistically assume that all pairs of variables are related in the same way—an unfortunate circumstance that undermines the possibilities of identifying the poor, aggregating their poverty levels and modeling non-trivial interactions between variables in highly flexible ways. This paper, which aims at modeling non-trivial relational structures across variables both in the identification and aggregation steps, is a first contribution towards addressing these inadequacies. The approach has been axiomatically characterized to flesh out the normative foundations upon which it is based and has a vast potential for application.