India, Oct. 30 -- Imagine a worker at a brick kiln in eastern Uttar Pradesh who is the sole wage-earner in a family of five. Although he earns enough to keep the household's spending above the World Bank's extreme poverty line of $3 per day, a look inside his house would show that his wife and children are underweight, the family cooks on a wood stove rather than on LPG, they share a latrine with neighbours and live under a thatched roof - all signs that we would associate with poverty. When we look closely, income-based poverty measures of the kind often reported miss a lot about the reality of people's lives.

To address this concern, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the United Nations Development Programme develo...