Multi-dimensional poverty orderings

This paper generalizes the poverty ordering criteria available for one-dimensional income poverty to the case of multi-dimensional welfare attributes. A set of properties to be satisfied by multi-dimensional poverty measures is first discussed. Then general classes of poverty measures based on these properties are defined. Finally, dominance criteria are derived such that a distribution of multi-dimensional attributes exhibits less poverty than another for all multi-dimensional poverty indices belonging to a given class. These criteria may be seen as a generalization of the single dimension poverty-line criterion. However, it turns out that the way this generalization is made depends on whether attributes are complements or substitutes.