Width, not depth

By S.H. | LONDON

“THIS dollar-a-day measure,” says Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in economics, “doesn’t take into account many variations that influence the conversion of income into good living.” Mr Sen argues that if we simply focus on eradicating extreme poverty (living on less than $1.25 a day), we will miss important social ills that are unrelated to income. He has therefore been one of the main proponents of developing alternative indicators such as the Human Development Index—whose latest edition was published last week. But how useful are these indices?

The purpose of alternative development and poverty data is to look beyond money and to recognise that people may be disadvantaged in areas other than income, such as nutrition, education and housing. The argument is that economic development may not necessarily translate into improvements in these non-economic measures. Child malnutrition in India, for instance, has been persistent in spite of the country’s rapid economic growth and impressive reduction of extreme poverty. This was the idea behind the development of the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which considers ten indicators of poverty, including nutrition, child mortality, sanitation, electricity, clean-water access and years of schooling.