La pobreza es multidimensional: un ensayo de clasificación

Abstract

In this classificatory essay I present five main types of multidimensionality in the recent literature on poverty and human development. The first is intra-economic multidimensionality. Income, aggregate or individual, is accompanied with distribution, assets, employment, or other dimensions. By the second, non-economic elements are added, usually to income. Two versions of this type are very common and influential. In the first multidimensional factors explaining incomepoverty are introduced. Some of these factors are defined as “capital,†human, physical, social, cultural, symbolic, etc. In the second of them economic and non-economic elements define poverty. In both cases income, alone or accompanied, is still seen as an end. The third type eliminates income from the definition of poverty. The qualitative and quantitative transformation of income in order to define the Human Development Index is one of the ways that it is done, but it is even more explicit in the calculation of the Human Poverty Index by the UNDP where income is not included. The last two types arise out of wider approaches in the fields of political philosophy or moral philosophy. The fourth type consists in the introduction of the modern way of classifying the spheres of life. The “economic,†“political,†“social,†“cultural,†etc. spheres are considered dimensions of development, and also of poverty. The fifth type is more openly philosophical and is based in the explicit analysis of values and their relation to development.