Introduction The multidimensional view of human well-being has had a growing influence on research on inequality and poverty. This development owes much to the conceptualization of the ‘capability approach’ by Sen (1985; 1987), but the shift has not been confined to academic circles and has extended to policy-oriented analysis. Since 1990 the United Nations Development Programme has challenged the primacy of GDP per capita as the measure of progress by proposing the Human Development Index (HDI), which combines income with life expectancy and educational achievement (e.g. UNDP 2005). The World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty opened with the statement that: ‘This report accepts the now traditional view of poverty … as encompassing not only material deprivation (measured by an appropriate concept of income or consumption), but also low achievements in education and health … This report also broadens the notion of poverty to include vulnerability and exposure to risk – and voicelessness and powerlessness’ (World Bank 2001: 15). The European Commission has long favoured the concept of social exclusion since ‘more clearly than the concept of poverty, understood far too often as referring exclusively to income, it also states out the multidimensional nature of the mechanisms whereby individuals and groups are excluded from taking part in the social exchanges’ (Commission of the European Communities 1992: 8).
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 201 citations exist upstream.