Apart from the technical details, this methodology consists of estimating an income line according to the cost of living of the region that is being measured and all those who have incomes less than that line are considered statistically poor.
While income-line poverty measurement has been a useful tool for assessing people’s economic well-being, it has also been criticized due to its inherent limitations. One of the main criticisms is that this measure tends to oversimplify the complexity of poverty, overlooking crucial factors that affect people’s quality of life. A person can be above the poverty line in terms of income, but still lack access to essential services that directly affect their quality of life and future opportunities.
In addition, poverty measures based solely on income lines often do not consider regional disparities in cost of living. For example, the same amount of money can have a very different value in expensive urban areas compared to cheaper rural areas. This can lead to an underestimation of the true magnitude of poverty in areas with high cost of living.
Another criticism of this way of understanding poverty is that it does not recognize that inequality is a deeply related problem. Two people may have similar incomes, but if one faces a wider economic gap in their environment, their ability to lift themselves out of poverty is likely to be much more difficult. The income-based measurement does not adequately capture these differences.
It is precisely because of this type of inconsistency that the measurement of poverty has evolved into a multidimensional measurement, which considers not only the level of income, but also access to different factors such as housing, health services, and education.
For this reason, the agency publishes the results of its multidimensional measurement at the same time, which yield less optimistic results, since the vulnerable population due to social deprivations went from 23.7% in 2020 to 29.4% in 2022.