South Africa measures poverty using a monetary approach as well as multidimensionally, with the former measure being the official poverty measure.It has been my experience that you can either present complex phenomena such as poverty elegantly with a single composite index or awkwardly with a multiplicity of indices. It is a challenging task to explain the latter to busy policymakers and politicians with the short attention spans of speed-master tweeters. These two positions of simplicity versus complexity are a matter of deep intellectual discourse that spans decades if not centuries.

In Viet Nam, the Government publishes national targets for poverty reduction every five years and updates poverty lines to measure changes in poverty within those five-year periods. Up to and including 2015, Viet Nam only used an income-based poverty measure. The poverty line was set at the amount of money per month sufficient for a 2100 Kcal/person/day diet as well as essential non-food spending. Using the Poverty Census, the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA) then identified and made a commune-level list of poor households based on this poverty line, and this list was reviewed and updated annually. The General Statistics Office (GSO) then conducted the Viet Nam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) and disseminated its findings on income levels, poverty rates, and the GINI inequality coefficient.

In Costa Rica, approximately 87% (1) of jobs are in the private sector. It is a dynamic sector that is constantly growing. However, what are the living conditions of these workers? Does having a job and an income ensure that they have a good quality of life? Could there be multidimensionally poor workers in the private sector? The association Horizonte Positivo, with the support of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), developed the Business Multidimensional Poverty Index (bMPI) to answer these questions.