In this issue, we highlight two examples of national multidimensional poverty indices. We explore Viet Nam’s experience using a national MPI as an official measure of poverty to complement income-based measures. Lo Thi Duc, Senior Statistician at the General Statistics Office of Viet Nam, takes us through how Viet Nam has used the MPI-VN not only to monitor poverty but also to identify the beneficiaries of social programmes.

We also spotlight Sierra Leone, which officially launched its MPI in May 2019, and we take a look at which dimensions and indicators were selected to build their index.

Moving from the national to the state level, we catch up with Oaxaca in Mexico,
a state with almost four million inhabitants and 570 municipalities. In this region, multidimensional measurement, disaggregated by municipality, has been used since 2017 to create public policies to tackle poverty. The results are already being seen. According to CONEVAL data, Oaxaca is the state that has had the greatest reduction in extreme poverty in percentage points in recent years. In this issue’s interview, Alejandro Murat Hinojosa, the state’s governor, describes the situation of poverty in Oaxaca and his administration’s poverty reduction policies. In a second article, Yolanda Martínez, Head of the Social and Human Development Secretariat of Oaxaca, explores in further detail how Oaxaca has integrated multidimensional poverty measurement into their policymaking.

Turning to other innovative initiatives, we cover an effort in Costa Rica to measure multidimensional poverty among private sector employees. The business MPI is an index that measures the living conditions of employees and their families. Using this data, businesses have been creating programmes to help improve the lives of their staff.

In this issue, we also feature a sample of research carried out by the United States Census Bureau, which recently published an exercise in multidimensional poverty measurement. In this edition’s ‘Data of the Month’ section, we look at what that index measured and how much multidimensional poverty it identified.

Finally, we would like to share with you that Dimensions magazine has undergone a change. Our co-editor Diego Zavaleta has taken a new path in his career. We wish him good luck and are infinitely grateful for his work and commitment to the magazine.

We invite you to read Dimensions, a new perspective for understanding poverty.

Carolina Moreno