Peculiarities in Multidimensional Regional Poverty

Poverty can be seen as a multidimensional phenomenon. A one-dimensional measure of poverty serving as a ranking index can be obtained by aggregating the different poverty aspects into a single scalar. Ranking indexes are thought of as supporting political decisions. We propose an alternative view based on simple concepts of partial order theory and illustrate the pros and cons of this approach taking as case study a multidimensional measure of poverty comprising three components—absolute poverty, relative poverty, and income—computed for the European Union regions. The analysis enables to highlight conflicts across the poverty components with some regions detected as controversial, with for example low levels of relative poverty and high levels of monetary poverty.