 Well, it was developed to solve a perplexing problem that existed in poverty measurement. Everyone knew the approach to measuring poverty using resources, using income or using consumption spent by people. And this was in fact a very great step forward when income or expenditure became common place for measuring poverty. However, it became readily understood that many aspects of poverty, in fact some of the very substantial part of the definition, might be missed through market activity and through things that could be purchased in the market. It was really a martyrs' sin who brought us to that realization in saying equality of what, therefore poverty of what. Well, that what should include things like capabilities that people have. These are not directly purchasable in the marketplace. Consequently, we try to go directly to the data and extract evidence of people's capabilities or environment or other things that could condition them so as to be poor or not and put it directly into the definition of who is poor and how poor they are. We're trying to include missing dimensions of poverty directly in the definition and the way we measure poverty. Just think of the first thing you'd imagine as being education. A person's education controls so much of what they do, the decisions they make, what their life chances are. Similarly, with health, if you can have evidence of a person's health, this might explain what is going on in their lives more directly than simply seeing whether they go to the local marketplace. These two and many more other conditions might be included in. In the data that you have in reality might not include exactly what you want, so you have to make compromises one way or the other, but living conditions have figured an important way, sanitation. In some cases, jobs are extremely important, a great policy, relevant variable that determines exactly whether a person is part of the mainstream or outside the mainstream in a particular economy. It really is, there's a broader array of possible variables that could be included. Fortunately, I don't have to make the decision nor do other poverty analysts have to make the decision all the time as to what is included since governments are taking this up and providing the power going to a committee to decide what should be included or not included in such an index. Because it all began with Mexico, who came to me and a few other people to ask how should we measure multidimensional poverty, and I asked the very natural question, why do you want to measure multidimensional poverty? You have a perfectly good income-based approach that, in fact, I participated in just six years, four years earlier, and they said, well, a law was passed in the country which requires us to measure poverty based on this, this, this, and this, and this dimension. So we simply have to find a way of combining these into a coherent and policy-relevant indicator. So they came to a number of people and asked for advice as to how to do this. So it turned out that at that same time I was working with Sabina Alkar at Oxford. She had come to a talk of mine on chronic poverty, and that technology was very, very similar to the kinds of multidimensional concerns, you know, many periods, many dimensions. So we were able to, she was actually able to convince me that it would work with multidimensional poverty. We then modified things, made it more reasonable, put it together, and out popped a way of looking at multidimensional poverty that seemed to have the right characteristics, which we then took back to the Mexican government. And the Mexican government all but adopted it as it was. So they took it up immediately because they had to. They had to take something that would be practical, that made sense, and incorporate it in their world, income with the other dimensions of social dimensions, as they called them, that they needed to include into their overall poverty measurement. And then down in Latin America, in Chile, there was a conference that was held shortly afterwards that attracted an incredible amount, a number of people, to discuss the way that this multidimensional poverty measurement was being rolled out. And before long, Columbia came along and said, this is what we need. We have an income-based measure, but unlike Mexico, we're not going to include income in our measure. We want a multidimensional poverty measure here, which can, in fact, focus on the other dimensions of importance in life. And they immediately rolled it out. And it has actually gone much further than we could imagine because the President has organized his cabinet, if you will, using this measurement device to coordinate the activities of the Minister of Health, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Education, so that everyone is accountable to everyone else. They meet on a regular basis with the President standing up before them saying, how much progress have we made on my promise to diminish poverty before my term is out? Within the UN system, it was an unusual situation that there came Jenny Klugeman into the HDRO, and she wanted to innovate in measurement in the HDRO, the Human Development Report Office of the UNDP, and approached Sabina and myself. And in that year, 2010, the Multidimensional Poverty Index, so named by a number of us, came into existence. It was a particular calibration of our general approach to fit the needs of a cross-country or global measure of poverty, being able to evaluate 100 or more countries at the same time. So that was implemented, of course, with cross-country situation. It's not anchored in a particular country's important dimension, so there had to be some more arbitrariness in picking dimensions, cutoffs, how far you would consider someone to be deprived before you'd say they're poor. But nonetheless, you make the decision, go with it, see what happens, and the result is out there for all to see. You have an alternative way of looking at poverty to the simple $1.25 a day approach of the World Bank. Well, it's quite interesting. If you have a country that is rather high in income, but low in terms of our measure, they immediately want to find out, and many times they will register certain kinds of inquiries to the office in the UN. And it's led to very fruitful discussions. Morocco's one example that was wondering, now why are we in the position over here and over... So if they look different to what they expect, the questions are raised, and guess what? That's what the whole business is about. What is happening with poverty in the country when you get to more basic fundamental dimensions and incorporate that into the poverty measurement? What's really happening? Governments stand up, take notice, and act upon it. I'm actually working on a project with the Asian Development Bank and defining and measuring inclusive growth. And it's clear that the more usual notions of inclusive growth are the vertical notion, which is does growth, which is defined as a change in the mean income, or per capita GDP, GNI, over time, does that growth go to other parts of the income distribution than just the top or the middle? Where does it go? Who benefits? And so that can be measured with poverty measures, with inequality measures, or as I gave in my talk yesterday, income standards, the standard for the entire distribution and our part and parcel of the measurement of poverty and inequality. But this is just one way of looking at inclusive growth, up and down the income distribution, because it could be that groups are more important. And in fact, in many cases, group inequality is much more salient than overall inequality. The inequality between men and women's earnings is a big issue. Inequality across ethnic groups in countries can tell you a lot about inequality of opportunities. And so the horizontal inequalities, to quote Francis Stewart of Oxford, can many times loom much more important than the vertical inequalities that I mentioned previously. So there's horizontal measures of inclusion are all groups included. In fact, it's reminiscent of the education policy. No child left behind. Now the UN is saying no group left behind in the MDGs of the future. The same thing here. It's including everyone in the growth process. But there's one additional way that you could think of inclusion. And that is inclusion across dimension. That we have growth in income is a good thing. But are we having growth in the other dimensions of life that are important for overall well being? Is education improving along with income? Or is that lagging behind? Is health improving? Or is service delivery improving? And these are other things that could be mentioned measured at the same time to evaluate the quality of growth. There's the third dimension of inclusion is therefore across the different dimensions of well being that people would find to be important to them. And so this is called very naturally dimensional inclusion. It's including other dimensions of well being into the growth process and analyzing it. Actually, all of this is just an empirical question. Is it happening or is it not? And I'm asking to take notice of these other ways, other things that are important that can come about through growth but may come about separately from growth at the same time as you look at growth as an indicator of development. We've undertaken studies with my friends at OFI, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative to evaluate how the multi-dimensional poverty index has been moving in conjunction with the growth rate in various countries. And it is surprising. Some countries have very fast income growth rates and naturally pretty good records in terms of income poverty. But when you look to the multi-dimensional poverty rate, it isn't changing anywhere as fast. Not much is occurring there. In other countries where there's a great deal of excitement in terms of the variables that people care about in their life but they don't see much excitement going on in income right now. Well, you might say well there's a lot happening in multi- dimensional poverty now even though income isn't changing much, the amount of change in multi-dimensional poverty is great per unit of change in income. That's something to know. It tells you something about the quality of the growth that's in that particular country. Well, I mean to someone who's worked with Amartya Sen and has in fact taught classes with Sen, you understand that this particular institution has a special significance in the way of thinking about development. The whole idea of human development as an important criterion by which to judge development processes stems from that and stems from that group of people who had the foresight to come together and create the institute. So I've known about this for quite a while. I met Amartya Sen through the mail as an undergraduate student in 1976 so I've been aware of the kinds of things that have been going on over time and from a distance and it's been quite exciting. But the interesting thing is that this is where a lot of the thought carries on where the kind of moral compass of the development economics community is really set for a significant number of us. I've been coming here for quite a while. I've seen many directors. I've seen some very interesting projects and had many of my papers come out of this building including one on robustness of the Human Development Index and other composite indicators was developed down the hall with Mark McGillivray when he was here and in fact work with Tony Shorox was done when he was here. Many people, the reason why it's such an exciting environment is that when we come here and visit for a short time, ideas come together immediately and we produce interesting results.