Multidimensional Poverty Measurement: The Mexican Wave

Abstract

If a doctor measures a patient’s blood pressure, it is possible that she can make a good diagnosis; there are various illnesses correlated to high (or low) blood pressure. But if the doctor measures only blood pressure, and nothing else, she might be overlooking important health problems. The same happens in the case of poverty when it is measured exclusively through income. There are other dimensions, such as access to social rights, which are important and should be considered alongside the measurement of income.

Social rights are universal and progressive. A right is universal when it is considered that everyone, without exception, should have it covered. Moreover, social rights need to be progressive because the effective access to these rights has to be gradual (Abramovich & Christian, 2006). This makes imperative the identification of the core social rights, establishing which of these are a priority and the resources needed in order to make them available to the population.