Brazil argues in favour of a multidimensional poverty indicator into the SDG agenda

 In an interview with WWP, Jannuzzi stressed the importance of evaluating poverty in a holistic manner; he explained the main areas of consensus and disagreements among experts in the field; and emphasized the Brazilian government’s view that multidimensional poverty indicators need to transcend a purely theoretical debate on concepts in order to reflect the impact (or lack of impact) of the set of policies that have been carried out.

Paulo Jannuzzi: Multidimensional poverty is a concept that has been worked on by several institutions, including the Ministry of Social Development, in an effort to reflect the multidimensionality of the poverty and vulnerability faced by specific segments of the general public.

Multidimensional poverty is manifested by the group of people who do not have enough income to buy a basket of food or to pay for the basic services they require for their survival; by the families that live in the countryside without access to the agricultural credit required for their own production; and by the inequities we see in segments of society such as indigenous peoples and people living on the streets.

Finally, multidimensional poverty is the operational concept that reflects this situation of lack of access to civic rights, basic rights guaranteed to all citizens, as well as to the basic income required for survival.

PJ: Monetary poverty regards as poor only those who lack the minimum monetary resources required for survival. Multidimensional poverty encompasses other dimensions involving access to services in education, health, work, housing, etc., which are important for a dignified life.

PJ: One complements the other, as do other related indicators that are important to our policies. We, at the Ministry of Social Development and Fight Against Hungry, work with indicators of monetary poverty, food insecurity, infant malnutrition, undernutrition, access to educational services, integration into the labour market by the poorest members of society, as well as multidimensional poverty indicators.

Each indicator helps us better understand how policy actions and programmes are impacting or failing to impact demographic segments and target groups.

PJ: There are better-known proposals such as those of the World Bank, UNDP and ECLAC, and there are the experiences of countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, Chile, etc. Some proposals are in a more advanced state of preparation, and others less so.

PJ: The obstacle is overcoming methodological disagreements. We are here [in the workshop] to discuss consensus and talk openly about the methodological problems of arbitrary choices in the construction of these indicators – ranging from the choice of indicators, the weights and the manner in which the indicators are combined and implemented.

PJ: For those of us who work at the Ministry of Social Development and Fight Against Hungry, we are keen to ensure that the instruments can reflect what we do or do not do, so that we can amend our policies accordingly. And the power of an multidimensional indicator is that it allows us to capture the aggregate effects of all actions, for example, how people are receiving cash transfers, how they are managing to convert qualifications into productive inclusion within the economy, how they are engaging in the labour market, how children are getting into schools, having access to water through tanks, etc.

That’s the idea behind an indicator of multidimensional poverty: it captures the combined effects of policies.

PJ: They all are taking the view that multidimensional poverty adopts a two-pronged approach toward access to income as well as access to more fundamental social rights such as education, housing, work, etc.

Some existing indicators fail to consider, for example, the dimension of “work”, which is a structural dimension in all Latin American countries that are at the level of medium and medium-high development. This dimension is crucial for Brazil because of the Brazilian strategy for overcoming extreme poverty, which is bound up with  the set of active policies incorporated in the “work” dimension, such as increasing the value of the minimum wage in real terms, formalization of the labour force, reducing unemployment, etc.

I would say this is one of the dimensions that differentiate many of the proposals presented in the course of this workshop.

PJ: In the book “Brazil without Poverty”, which we published last year, we make use of multidimensional poverty indicators from the UNDP and the World Bank as well as a number of other indicators. We have given consideration to multidimensional poverty indicators as we have given to other indicators, because this represents another way of measuring poverty.

Under the WWP, we are talking about indicators established last August [find out more about this workshop by clicking here], when we discussed monetary poverty. In November, we discussed policy indicators [learn more about the WWP First International Seminar by clicking here], which could be derived from information sources such as the Unified Registry, and other databases. And now, we are focusing on the multidimensional poverty indicator.

We have approached multilateral institutions, as well as the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA), to discuss these new indicators that are designed to reflect the effects or lack of effects of the full set of policies that we have carried out.

PJ: Our idea is to develop these discussions and, in particular, do what we can to ensure that these indicators can be strengthened as proposals for inclusion in the SDG agenda so that this agenda may encompass a multidimensional poverty indicator that is truly sensitive to the full range of actions and policies that several countries are developing, especially Brazil, and that focuses not only on income security, but also on promoting access to services for the most vulnerable segments of the population.