"Hay un sistema económico que se llama Cooperativismo, y el cual tengo conocimiento de causa ¿por que no utilizarlo en la Estrategia para la Reducción de la Pobreza? Muchos paises superaron la pobreza utilizando el Cooperativismo."

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"Considero muy importante y trascendente estudiar el concepto de pobreza en sus múltiples dimensiones, acorde con los estándares universales y tratar de forjar una sociedad más justa y homogenea donde impere la paz y la justicia."

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"Se menciona como aspectos pertinentes a la pobreza, "cuestiones importantes ajenas al mercado" y se señalan "el acceso a los servicios públicos" y "cuestiones de distribución (?) dentro del hogar". Creo que estos pueden ser indicaciones que apuntan no a un concepto multidimensional (yo diría integral) de la pobreza, sino que remarcan un sentido económico de la pobreza; cuando el auténtico debiese ser mucho más amplio, abarcando, entre otras aristas, la pobreza educativa, intelectual y principalmente de valores. La pobreza multidimensional debe entenderse con sentido integral, no simplemente desde la perspectiva de lo económico. La ponderación de la pobreza económica es esencial porque condiciona las posibilidades de vida del ser humano, pero la responsabilidad del Estado y también de la sociedad pueden coadyuvar a paliarla. La pobreza de valores y de educación, por ejemplo, no necesariamente está aferrada a la económica, y sin embargo puede ser tan traumática para la convivencia social que estimula expresiones de violencia; y desde otra perspectiva, además, quién es pobre por razones económicas tendrá mayores probabilidades de superación e integración social en la medida que no lo sea en sus valores y capacidad intelectual. Por lo tanto, al referirnos a la pobreza, debemos tener la precaución de no dejar de considerar que conjuntamente con posibles indicadores de orden económico, también deben expresarse estos otros que son realmente los fundamentales para el crecimiento de las personas, una vez superadas las más elementales condiciones de supervivencia."

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"La pobreza, no esta unicamente en el consumo de bienes materiales, la pobreza hay que atacarla en su esencia desde el analfabetismo, dar una educación de calidad al ser humano dese sus proimeros años de vida, preparalo para que tenga una mejor forma de vida, para esto lo material debe estar en equilibrio con lo espiritual, no fomentar la competencia sino la coperación."

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"I do agree with the argument of Sabina Alkire. We should examine it based on the intended use of it. If it is to sensitise policy makers, the MPI is an excellent tool. It will be a guiding force for ensuring convergence in the public service delivery at various level. It would be excellent if we can have built-in mechanisms to capture gender disparity in the MPI itself. This would help put the emphasis on ensuring the poverty reduction programme is gender responsive."

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"I took a look at all three contributions of the discussion so far (Duncan, Martin, Sabine). All the arguments they post pro and contra the new index are certainly right. According to my opinion the new index adds information but has weaknesses. No doubt about this. But there is a contribution this new index provides, which has not been discussed so far. In recent years CCT programmes are quite successful in may countries in reducing (extreme) poverty. But they are not targeted via income criteria. They are targeted via different kinds of multi-dimensional approaches. So as a matter of fact outside academics, in policy making, the idea of multidimensional poverty measurement is in use and is successful. The new index might have academic strengths and weaknesses but can have the power to be politically important and to provide a step in uniforming multidimensional measurements in some sense."

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"Es pobre el que tiene míseros ingresos. Si el estado, como para calcular el IDH, proporciona educación y salud gratuitas, talvez la pobreza de un indigente se alivie. Pero la pobeza nace de la explotación en la empresa privada, entidad que pareciera querer no tener hombres libres sino esclavos asalariados. No le anden buscando las causas mirando y silvando para el otro lado. Y no empleen, para medirla, muchos índices porque van a terminar enrrevesando el concepto. Pobre tiene que ser el peruano que gana 10 sóles diarios, 3.35 dólares. No puede ser pobre el que, también como aquí, gana 1000 dólares día. y la pobreza no depende de la habilidad o inteligencia, porque pueden haber diferencias de ingresosn, pero no tam abismales. Los sueldos astronómicos de los gerentes, ojalá fuese así su inteliglencia, nos se justifican. Estos inteligentes de otra galaxia, si no existieran los obreros y todo el personal necesario, no producirían nada. La pobreza terminará cuando las empresas sean de propiedad de los trabajadores y las utilidades se repartan por igual."

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"MPI definitely seeks to include various components of poverty in a single index and make it easy for concerted effort. But some of the indicators like for instance access to cooking fuel is something which many people in developing countries like India don't have or depend on traditional fuel. Should that be one of the components to gauge Poverty? I find many households who may not have clean cooking fuel but still are better off in terms of standard of living. Apart from it I find it very useful tool for everyone to take action against the global malady-poverty."

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"Una medición multidimensional de la pobreza es absolutamente necesaria para cuantificar el nivel o niveles de avance y mejora en la calidad de vida de las personas, mi precepción es que la simplificación en variables como ingreso y necesidades básicas ayuda pero no es suficiente; estoy además consciente que varias agencias de desarrollo como BID o Banco Mundial confian más en variables "objetivas" que en subjetivas, si embargo, uno de los grandes avances que incluyó el Prof. Amartya Sen en el desarrollo es la consideración de varias variables en la medición de la pobreza que en este caso podrían tomarse en cuenta."

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"Medidas agregadas para el cálculo de la pobreza como el ingreso y el consumo son «indiferentes» a ciertas categorías, principalmente al sexo de las personas. En este caso, las diferencias se dan a lo interno de los hogares y dichas medidas clasifican igualmente a cada miembro del hogar. Una medida multidimensional, además de que permite enfocar políticas públicas, posibilita estimar las diferencias, por ejemplo, de género, en la pobreza."

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"Creo que las mismas instituciones contratadas para echar a andar programas para combatir la pobreza contribuyen a la misma en un grado tal, que al final de cuentas las medicinas en lugar de curar prolongan la enfermedad. Tengo un amigo PhD de Harvard que por muchos nos trabajo para el banco Mundial. En una ocasión me confesó dos coas graves: Una, que los gastos administrativos son tan altos que consumen mucho del dinero para los programas, específicamente en África. Dos, que los administradores locales también se exceden en sus gastos de tal manera que un alto % del costo del programa sirve para cubrir gastos que impiden una inversión alta y por tanto los rendimientos son bajos. Estoy usando el lenguaje que en una palabra podemos designar esta tragedia como "corrupción". Este mal se ha universalizado de manera que podemos decir: La medicina ha acelerado la gravedad del enfermo y la muerte asoma en cada región donde la pobreza esta tan generalizada que cada día, en países africanos y latinoamericanos están condenados a que se repirta el fenómeno de los países ricos: los pobres cada día son mas y los ricos crecen en igual proporción, luego la profundidad de las diferencias sociales han crecido tanto que ya la pobreza no tiene solución."

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"I am always confused on the measurements of poverty. Ethiopia is at the tail of the development in terms of Livelihoods, Health, Education, wellbeing and Infrustructure. However, some national measurements declared by the national government are showing that we are doing well. If you see the rural context on the other hand, the depth of poverty is escalating following the current global ecomomic crisis and climate changes. On the other hand, the largest economies of China, America, Germany, etc are not the leading ones in the UNDP report. What does it mean exactly?"

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"Well, one thing is perfectly clear – poverty is multidimensional and goes beyond income (expenditure/consumption). How best can we measure this multidimensional phenomenon is the biggest question that all development researchers and practitioners have been bogged down in? I strongly believe that a dollar a day ($1.25 a day) cannot capture the extent of poverty one is going through. The worst part is governments are rejoicing for reducing poverty by gauging their achievement against this measurement – instead of going back to the drawing board and critically looking at their strategy. The WB– using their financial muscle as an advocacy - is the first institute to clamp their hands in support of such flawed conclusions. In order to critically see the extent and depth of poverty a comprehensive measure is needed. This measure does not have to be perfect, rather has to clearly show the problem vividly. We all know the problem of aggregation to measure once (household’s) wellbeing – and if the new tool is based on a household data that is a being leap forward. Having said this, one alarming issue that all needs to take into account is the quality of data (sometimes doctored data); and one way of minimizing such challenges is triangulation. Looking at the multidimensional (broader) factors is one additional advantage I could see immediately."

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"The concept development is a very wide concept and it is not lonely expected to be measured taking the background the ability of personal financial to an individual day to day activity but it is more than financial and its also a social, political, psychological and environmental cummulative effect."

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"Tenemos que crear una conciencia de desarrollo en las poblaciones más pobres. Existe una herencia cultural de carencia y de, sobre todo de impotencia, que hay que cambiar. Necesitamos políticas públicas de comunicación y educación para modificar patrones culturales obsoletos de discriminación y desigualdad. Políticas públicas para crear conciencia sobre los derechos sociales, económicos y culturales, y sobre los deberes que estos derechos traen consigo. Cada ser humano tiene que saber que tiene derecho a una vida digna y el deber de procurársela."

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"No measure on poverty, vulnerability is beyond debate and so is this. However, any approach to address a critical development issue like this in larger perspective tends to organize strategy better. This might need sharper focus... could leave out this, consider that etc. Still the relevance of this MPI is a reality. In view of capturing realities isn't poverty estimation half-baked without considering its position before disparity. Hypothetically even if strategy built on MPI is 100% accomplished, the ever-growing distance between low and high (multi-layered) income usually leaves the LOWs in crisis in many forms - that may not be covered in existing enumeration yet runs risks of various frictions in society."

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"Congratulations to Alkire and Foster for focusing much needed attention on the issue of multidimensional poverty and, moreover, for advancing the case for a single, multidimensional index to measure deprivation in the developing world. As seemingly most development economists recognize, poverty is more than a lack of income or inadequate consumption, but is composed a host of factors that simultaneously act to constrain capabilities and increase deprivation. Part of the debate around unidimensional or multidimensional metrics plays out something like this: from a policy perspective, if poverty is equated with lack of income, then policies that promote economic growth would appear to be all that are needed to reduce poverty. If, instead, poverty is a multidimensional phenomenon, then, as Kanbur and Grusky have put it, “The task (of remediating multidimensional poverty) …. requires targeting those aspects of inequality and poverty (e.g. residential segregation) that are causal with respect to many outcomes and hence likely to bring about cascades of change (my emphasis).” Our task as researchers and policymakers is to determine which aspects of poverty are causal with respect to many outcomes, and to make those aspects the targets of policy interventions. I do have a few questions, though, for the HDRO, particularly if, as noted in the press release back in June, the MPI will replace the Amartya Sen and Sudhir Anand-developed Human Poverty Index, used by UNDP to track multidimensional poverty since 1997. In some of the literature that came out in June around the launch of the MPI, it was noted that “the MPI fixes weights between countries to enable cross-national comparisons; alongside this we strongly encourage countries to develop national measures having richer dimensions, and indicators and weights that reflect their context as Mexico did and Colombia is doing.” Does this mean that the HDRO will calculate its MPI for country X, while country X may calculate its own in any given year? If they differ, will the HDRO’s calculation be the MPI of record, or will the country’s be? What if country X takes advantage of the MPI’s flexibility in the choice of dimensions and indicators and, due to changes in political leadership, for example, chooses to calculate that country’s MPI with a different array of indicators the following year? What does this do to the ability of researchers to calculate change over time? In this case, would researchers simply resort to the UNDP’s calculation of country X’s MPI? And what about the data sources used to calculate the MPI? Ravallion notes that: “Rather (the indicators) were chosen because the methodology used by the MPI requires that the analyst has all the indicators for exactly the same sampled household. So they must all come from one survey. There is much better data available on virtually all of the components of the MPI, but these better data can’t be used in the MPI since they are only available from different surveys. This aspect of their methodology greatly constrains the exercise.” An advantage that the HPI has over the MPI is that it can be used in the absence of disaggregated data. As I understood it, HDRO statisticians collect new or projected data for each of the HPI’s 4 indicators from one year to the next—from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division’s analysis of national vital registration systems, from UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics, from WHO, etc. From a quick review of OPHI’s country profiles, it appears as though the data for individual country MPIs are drawn either from Demographic and Health Surveys (conducted every 5 years), or from the World Health Surveys (conducted irregularly), or from Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (conducted every 5 years or so). How will the MPI for any given country be calculated next year, given the infrequency of the surveys on which it depends? For those interested in longitudinal studies of changes in deprivation, how should the MPI be used? It would seem that an argument could be made that the loss in precision is made up for in the HPI’s ability to measure annual changes in deprivation, albeit at an aggregated level. On the question of decomposability, Alkire and Foster tout this feature of the MPI as one of its more significant advantages over other multidimensional indices that rely on aggregated data. However, Sen seems less convinced, noting that when decomposability is insisted on for all possible subgroupings, a basic conceptual problem emerges: " The mathematical form of decomposability has had the odd result of ruling out any comparative perspective (and the corresponding sociological insights), which is, in fact, fatal for both inequality and poverty measurement… It is easy to see why decomposability has such a strong appeal. It is ‘nice’ to be able to ‘break down’ the overall poverty of a total population into poverty in different subgroups of people that make up the total population. It gives, I suppose, some forensic satisfaction in solving a ‘whodunit’ (and by how much respectively)… (However), mathematically the demand that the breakdown works for every logically possible classification has the effect that the only measures of inequality or poverty that survive treat every individual as an island ....” (Sen, in Grusky and Kanbur, eds, Poverty and Inequality, 2006) Again, I applaud Alkire and Foster for bringing attention to the measurement of multidimensional poverty. However, readers should be reminded that theirs is only the latest in a long line of similar efforts, each with strengths and weaknesses. The UNDP may want to consider including the MPI to supplement its array of metrics, rather than to supplant the HPI. They measure different, but still important, things."

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"The new MPI definitely gives a better idea about the nature and seriousness of poverty for the developing ones. But thinking as a future politician the policy decision will be at stake with these many kinds of dimensions officially being added to poverty. Moreover the exchequer will be severely stressed as it shows the importance and severity of all the problems in one single shot."

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"Quoi que disent les critiques ce nouvel indice apporte un plus à la vision de la pauvreté humaine dans le monde. Il permet aux gouvernements et organismes spécialisés d'avoir des leviers spécifiques pour construire leur politique de lutte contre la pauvreté. Certes cet indice pourrait être très vite dépassé car le monde est en perpétuelles mutations susceptibles de modifier ses déterminants. Il reste néanmoins, pour le moment, le plus intéressant pour appréhender la pauvreté. La balle est dans le camp des décideurs dont nous doutons de la volonté de réduire cette pauvreté car ce ne sont pas les moyens qui manquent!"

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"First of all I would like to congratulate the researchers who brought the innitiative to deal with the issue "poverty" in a multidimensional level, of course I do bow to the idea. I state so because I live in a poor country and for more than a year I work at the grass root level where many programmmes which struggle against poverty are being handled. I've been watching that despite of the efforts made by governments, NGOs and foreign organisations, people are getting poorer and poorer, what shows that even increasing the income there are other issues that deserve attention. Mainly those regarding illiteracy and the lack of farming projects. I underline that poverty is dangerous because, in my point of view it is responsible for the deaths of mothers and children. I have been witnessing this, unfortunately."

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"La pobreza en realidad tieve varias variables, va mas alla de la satisfacciones de las necesidades basicas o de mejorar los ingresos familiares, en realidad se hacerca mas a las dimensiones materiales y esenciles del yo que no permiten el avance de las familias y de sus hijos. el mismo hecho de continuar con actitudes que le hacen daño, como el envenenamiento de su salud y de sus suelos por la alta utilización de abonos quimicos y pesticidas, hasta de tomar una desicion incorrecta en la elección de sus autoridades que generalmente se actua por imitación sin un analisis previo de las alternativas de desarrollo que proponen. el hecho de haber provenido de madres con deficiencias nutricionales hacen que se transmita de generación en generación esta actitud y no se pueda desarrollar las capacidades optimas de las personas, del joven y del niño a pesar de que la familia y sus hijos tienen educación. y estoy segura que la pobreza no esta siendo abordado desde una medida multidimensional."

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"Es importante diseñar estrategias o programas sociales, efocados al desarrollo de las capacidad de las personas, capacitarlos e impulsarlos hacia una independencia económica, para no generar beneficiarios pasivos; problema que generan algunos programas al subsdiarlos periodicamente sin resultado alguno."

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"My area of concern is community upgrading and youth empowerment and thats what my organization addresses basically. Having read the UNDP's 6th Edition of Human Development Report, the findings shows that Kenyan Youths have the numeric strength yet they play a minor role in Nation's development. I strongly believe that if my country needs to participate fully in realisation of the Millennium Development Goals, then the youths participation and involvement must be a key prioty, clearly discused in the report."

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"My area of concern is community upgrading and youth empowerment and thats what my organization addresses basically. Having read the UNDP's 6th Edition of Human Development Report, the findings shows that Kenyan Youths have the numeric strength yet they play a minor role in Nation's development. I strongly believe that if my country needs to participate fully in realisation of the Millennium Development Goals, then the youths participation and involvement must be a key prioty, clearly discused in the report."

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