so and i am this pleased to open this session on this place meaning that this session is dedicated to tony atkinson please i would like to see these slides tony atkinson has been one of the major economists from last century died as a young man on january the first this year at the age of 72 he had been ill for three years here the myeloma which did not allow him to live long since diagnosed well i would like to start off by showing you this sentence he wrote to me very probably in his last email to me in november and he soon afterwards died which is and he said but it is quite interesting to read all the different countries studies for places that i scarcely knew existed like the solomon islands i keep an atlas on my desk i'm very impressed with the overall quality of the work being produced in statistical offices around the world and feel that there is a lot of scope for mutual learning questions so even in an email to me um who was we've been a friend of him for 30 years shows tony's personality was deeply affected by his disease at that point but his intellectual intellectual curiosity was still there he would describe everything in the smallest details he was writing on global poverty and was acquiring information from everywhere in the world this is probably interesting for economists but also for other scientists normally they pick up data and never go deeper into them tony who was a man who was very well known for his studies of theories did these with great emphasis and i also like the fact that tony had a kind of a a crash craftsmanship for people who carry out their jobs seriously at all levels here we have statisticians but not only i'm referring to them i once went going to tony's house in oxford and a carpenter was refurbishing or revamping an old clothes cabinet tony is the person he was astonished by his abilities and tony's been a person who was started by a large poverty he has founded the modern analysis on measurement for the measurement of poverty and we will dwell on a couple of items here at the festival it was first with us in 2006 six when we dealt with richness richness and poverty we came back back in 2015 during the festival edition called social mobility today there's still a very close link with tony because his book on inequalities that i will be telling you about in a minute was dedicated to the wonderful people who work in the national health service in england in great britain tony was a supporter of public services and he had to put them to the test when he was there and he spoke with the great respect of about all the people who took care of him so how is this session set up when titaberry asked me to organize today's meeting on tony atkinson i thought i would recall this book on the left-hand side that on inequality what can be done this book was translated into italian it's probably available downstairs and a cl clara channel wrote the introduction to it that's why clara is with us today and it is also important to stress that tony always felt a very deep respect for other disciplines he was a multidisciplinary man in nature he entertained a close dialogue with sociologists as kara will tell us and the last publication it was up on the invitation of the world bank and is entitled monitoring global poverty which he wrote on a with the help of a committee on global poverty is there was a smaller a smaller group that helped tony along in the last few years so that he could draft this very bulky report written by tony and for which he takes on full responsibility it is a report that shows how the world bank should measure inequalities in the future and here is the connection with with today's title in fact part an important part of this report is devoted to the multi-dimensional aspect of extreme poverty and we have the representative of the world bank who will also talk about this close link with tony's report i mentioned uh i mentioned the clara canelo francisco ferreira from the world bank and we also have rudy nutty with us a musician and a director living in barcelona is italian hopefully we'll not be speaking spanish rudy luthius showed a documentary that also includes an interview to tony atkinson it's not long it's um a 12-13 minute interview and these shootings are also part of tony's documentary through these documentaries so he followed the entire interview to tony atkinson rudy will have the floor for a few minutes he's not an economist he's not a sociologist probably he's a layman sociologist so you have a chance to say something about tony as well so please the video well i think globalization has is literally transforming our world if i think back to the last few centuries we saw a time when parts of the world europe and the united states pulled ahead in terms of economic success and was a great divergence between what was happening there and what was happening in the rest of the world and in the last 10 20 30 years we've seen that divergence becoming convergence and we now have in many parts of the world but not quite all because some areas clearly are not enjoying the same economic benefits but nonetheless we have seen dramatic improvements for example reductions the number of people living in absolute poverty in countries like china india and elsewhere which is really i think is a very obviously very positive dramatic change in the situation of the world i think the technological change we've seen which has been very dramatic one needs to bear in mind i think two things one is that it of course is largely man-made it's not somehow arrived from outer space i mean we've developed these technologies and that means of course that we can influence the directions which they go in which in which they're used so we shouldn't disregard technical change as somehow something which is uh not outs is outside our control and that means i think we need to think about what kind of technological developments we want to see in the future and how they're being used and then i think the second thing about it of course is that it's affected the demand for skilled workers who can work with these new technologies and develop them but it also affected the balance between labor and capital a classical question about what determines the distribution of income and i think that's the aspect which perhaps which hasn't received as much attention as it ought to have done there's a tendency to think that modern technology is basically machines or replacing people uh robotization is an example of that but of course that changes the nature of what is being provided and just to give a simple example we could distribute medicines simply by people going to a box and taking them out which they're placed by a robot but of course in fact when you take medicines you don't just want the the the bottle or the tube you want to actually know about how to use it and whether it's suitable for your illness and so on and that's of course is a human element where you need a person to tell you in fact sort of look at you and say well actually perhaps at your age you shouldn't be taking this or perhaps in your circumstances so and so on so i think there's a risk we may lose the this human element which is an essential part of the service and i think we see this with consumers that already they are rejecting for example just going to a internet site and a call center or whatever to get the product they actually want the human part of it in and that's what we have to somehow develop we keep that certainly unemployment is i i think one of the most serious problems we face and it's very little really discussed i mean i think it's somehow people come to accept really quite high levels of unemployment and when i was a student we the unemployment rate in this country in the united kingdom was one percent and we regarded with horror the idea might rise to say two or two and a half percent and now today we're congratulating ourselves on getting it down to five percent so i think this is one of the things which in particular in in europe we've somehow let this very important concerns disappear and we've particularly in the case of young people tolerated levels of unemployment which i think are quite uh unacceptable and quite damaging for the future so i would myself want to see unemployment placed now much more in the the priority for governments and for the european union for example in its policies technology plays a role in this but i don't think we should say that it's all technology i think that it's also the policies we pursued of a macroeconomic kind and giving priority to reducing inflation for example over making sure everyone has a job and i mean i think it wasn't that long ago that the united states actually passed legislation saying that the president could create public jobs to deal with unemployment i was in 1978 and i think in the same way our governments should actually i mean just as they don't allow banks to fail they shouldn't allow people to be unemployed yes i think inequality is uh not only i think it's important their moral issue is also as you say that the inequality has adverse consequences which are um i would say partly in terms of the macroeconomic economic consequences like for example the sustainability of growth as uh the head of the international monetary fund has said she just doesn't think we can have sustained growth if with this present levels of inequality the world faces three or four major challenges of which uh climate change and resource use is is one of them and i think the reduction would have is another one and my own view is we should somehow look for solutions and actually face all of the problems and by doing so we may find that for example the methods being used to make uh to deal with the risk of global warming may in themselves contribute to resolving other problems for example like returning to the technology issue and developing technologies which actually are environmentally more friendly but also may well be more uh need more labor for example to produce them and make them and so on so i think that we should look for policies that try and take deal with all the major challenges that there are well i think the the key thing in a way is who makes the decisions uh that is uh who is responsible for for example decisions to exploit uh oil under the arctic uh ice uh shelf and so on these decisions should i my view be ones which are taken in the wider social interests and not simply taken the point of view of the shareholders of companies which is what largely happens at the moment so i think indeed the issues uh these these challenges we face are um challenges for societies as a whole for the world as a whole and to do that we have to have the decision-making process reflecting the wider interests yes i i've been looking for a new form essentially of social security partly i think because the world has changed since we designed the system uh a hundred years or so ago and that we can't anymore rely simply on people having a job which guarantees enough income so the idea of a universal basic income is one i think which is quite a wide appeal but that then raises a question as to who is entitled to it and people talk for example about a citizen's income but certainly in the case of the united kingdom and it's probably true in italy there are many citizens who don't live in italy or don't live in the united kingdom i mean we have many citizens who live in the united states or wherever so i think we have to define it differently in terms of who is actually living in a society and taking part in it where that may mean it may be employment it may mean self-employment it may for example mean obviously being in education or training it certainly would also include people who are caring for example for elderly or dependent relatives or for children young very young children so there'll be a variety of things that it might even include people who are doing for example unpaid work there are a lot of people now doing unpaid work or they're working for this campaign so i think there are a variety of things which would then define the people to whom this basic income would then be paid i have to think about this in historical context in the sense that we uh the united nations and other bodies are considerably more effective and influential than say the league of nations was before or the nothing that was before that so we have moved quite a long way towards uh international cooperation and i think it's actually allowed the world may look a disordered place there's been a lot more a lot of change in the last 20 years or so many more organizations for example dealing with issues which are very difficult issues like migration and we now have an international migration organization and slowly very slowly the european union and other groups are beginning to get to grips with these questions so i think it'll be slow but uh i think we've seen in several another area would be issues about for example taxation and tax avoidance and taxation of companies where again there's a tremendous amount of avoidance invasion at the moment but governments are beginning to get to try and tackle these problems well i i i think it's rather doubtful that we shall move to the stage where people have uh so much uh leisure i think partly because uh well in a way i suppose the notion of leisure and work may become less clear so that's uh i mean i i do a job which i enjoy doing and i think that may be one of the changes that happens i mean many people move to doing things that have been routine and hard physical work to doing jobs which are much more uh rewarding in many senses so i think the simple distinction between the leisure and work isn't such a clear one but also i think that um it's because of the need for example because of the aging of the population i mean i think we do need people providing services and so we may replace we may have robots producing your car but they're not going to replace providing your medical care or your education at the other end of the age man i think so there are many many things for which we we need people and as a result of that i think they won't spend all their time sitting on the beach so thank you so much andrea for inviting me when i was asked to come and talk about mr atkinson i was sort of perplexed because i thought i'm not an economist and i must say that the film is entitled in the same boat and it was presented last year here at the festival in trenton you see 30 years ago i started anthropology anthropology cultural anthropology in rome and i was so lucky as to read a book by aggie aznar and the book is entitled working less working all of us so that everybody can work and this is something that we talk about so much today the point is does technology have the capability of replacing human beings and if so can we exploit that and distribute the wealth of this production that is taking place now when i started shooting the movie with the sigmund bowman who also died and tony atkinson and jose mujica from uruguay is also in the movie in the film and specialists like eric brickenson and others so i interviewed so many people and i interviewed several thinkers and experts and there is another thing which is not of secondary importance so there are interviews with people who are ordinary people and they live all over the world from africa in india in europe and so on and so forth the point is i we wanted to exchange views about the fact that technology might change our life and if so to what extent and what can we do so we talked about this with andrea and he told me you cannot avoid involving mr atkinson professor atkinson since you address inequalities and as a matter of fact the topic of the video of the movie is how can we distribute wealth in the moment when employment is not a driver is not a factor distributing wealth and the major inequalities that are being created also in relation to robotization uh of course is a topic that professor atkinson was an expert in and so i organized that interview and i was sort of concerned because i knew how important and what an outstanding professor he was and i was also worried because you see when you interview somebody you have to rearrange the the room entirely due to the equipment but what happened is that with sigmund bowman and with tony atkinson we had a wonderful experience they were so extremely kind and cooperative he was an extraordinary person a very ironic as well and at a certain point the director of photography accompanied me and he is the person who is in charge of making sure that each and every detail is accurate and at the end of the interview he told me rudy we have a problem we have to ask the first questions again because there was a cloud well how can i ask professor atkinson after one and a half hour that we have to redo the beginning and he saw that i was quarreling with the other guy and he asked me why are you what is the problem what are you discussing and i explained what it was and he said well no problem at all and it took us an extra hour so he was extremely kind very very kind to conclude i would like to say something about the optimism that he really had and in general he was an optimist person and i think that that optimism clearly emerges also from the film part of what you saw is part of the of the of the film of the movie you see it is a sort of uh combination of the interviews of the various thinkers a sort of jigsaw and professor atkinson maintained that we were making a step forward while professor baumann said that we do not have a global organization that ceases to solving global issues and he talked about the fact that politics is no longer empowered is less powerful than in the past unless the politics again is powerful and has power to do something we cannot reach anything we cannot achieve anything and that this is what sigmund marmont thought why professor atkinson was a more optimistic he saw that we are striving to find strong organizations to solve global problems so he was optimistic and he was also an optimistic person because he really thought what you also heard that technology would replace many jobs but done by human beings but he also said that we could redirect things and redirect this in terms of eliminating uh jobs that uh humans dislike so that robots would perform those jobs and human beings could devote themselves to things that they like also when working he said i enjoy my my job i like working i hope that this applies to everybody while professor baumann said that jobs would disappear and the real problem of humanity will be what will we do throughout the day when we are awake since we do not have to work so much since a work is not going to be the pillar of society not any longer thank you very much rudy for providing us with this uh picture of tony atkinson thank you very much for giving us and offering us this perspective now the floor goes to chiara saraceno is one of the best sociologists we have in europe not only in italy and kiara taught her four years at turina university and he is also an honorary fellow of the carloberto collegio chiara you have the floor i'm not an economist and yet i knew tony atkinson well and i would like to recall how interested he was in multidisciplinary approaches because he was so curious about what others could contribute with and the fact that he could be helped understanding things by others you see the first time i spoke to professor atkinson and of course he is my favorite economist and then you come and andrea after professor atkinson he has always been my economist of reference since i'm interested in poverty and i think back of when we first met it must have been in the 80s before lycans indicators so we were talking at the time and we discussed and talked about the unit of reference that should be adopted when investigating poverty and measuring poverty the person or the household and being a sociologist i said i understand that individuals should not be taken as a unit because there is the issue of sharing resources and it is not so that personal income necessarily mirrors things it is a consumption that that counts so there are many factors that come into the picture and yet taking for granted that there is equality within a household within a family was something that professor atkinson was convinced of and i had some doubts about that so that assumption i thought was not uh empirically evidenced and based and that is a problem of course because if we use the family the household as a unit that is something that we have to take into account and he answered you're right and yet we also have to simplify things a bit and i was then very pleased by one thing when i was asked to introduce this book because i saw that he addressed this problem very precisely without finding a solution yet and yet he recognized that there was this problem because the problem is linked to power power relations and i'm not only thinking of the two genders but i'm also thinking of generations of different generations recently researcher has been made about that in an attempt of calculating these factors and it has been said that if we consider both the individual and the family and people in families we see that the incidence of poverty is often underestimated so if we only take into account households families we underestimate the incidence of poverty so you see at the time i i was nothing when compared to tony atkinson and i still am of course but i'm happy that in a way he accepted my point and he explored it throughout his life so having said that let's come to the topic we address today which is the multi-dimensional approach to inequality and specifically poverty what does professor atkinson teach us in that respect well there are a couple of things i would like to mention first of all based again on this book on inequalities and professor atkinson addressed the economic inequalities and by doing so he not only developed the concept of available family income which is more complex than what we simply derive from income per se and try and monetary transfers but what he also did was to consider services and the welfare values which is the reason why it is an extended household income and that is a very interesting concept this is useful you see because in this way we can consider for instance the fact of having or not having access to services and to welfare because that really makes a difference perhaps your income is the same and yet you have or do not have access to services and that makes the difference an example is made in the book about that in relation to the proposals made to take into account the distribution of a specific consumer goats which are scarce and food housing education and healthcare among others so if we consider economic inequality only anyway we have to take into account access to those assets to those services well i think that we should also recall the fact that tony atkinson greatly influenced the process by which lakin's indicators were defined those indicators apply at european level for the social protection committee and they are indicators of social um well-being and welfare and he was a member of several committees and commissions together with another very important economist brian nolan and two sociologists decanteon and eric mayer in 2002 with this multi-disciplinary approach they did a very important publication that was important and uh for for for the future lakers indicators and it was a book about social inclusion and social indicators it was as i said back in 2002 there they underlined the importance of identifying and developing prop appropriate social indicators in order to monitor and evaluate social development in a country and also in order to evaluate the impact of policies it was an important book not only for the type of indicators proposed but also for the indications it gave in terms of methods in addressing indicators and the direction to be taken by the statistical institutes in the various countries when collecting important indicators so it was uh said that areas should be poverty including intensity and duration or persistence and then income inequalities deprivation non-monetary deprivation low levels of education unemployment um lack of jobs poor health and distribution of poor health seat conditions in in a in a country poor housing conditions and the lack of housing as well as structural and functional sorry illiteracy and innumeracy which refers to one's functional logical mathematical capabilities and skills and also limited social participation after some years that was further developed but before addressing that let me tell you that an important aspect of tony atkinson's approach pertained to the fact that everything has to be very rigorous but it does not last forever it is not engraved in marble and stone you have all constantly to reveal the correctness of your indicators because the world changes and because you might understand at a certain point that what you thought was an effective indicators an effective indicator actually is not so after some years when commenting social indicators that had been agreed upon and within the framework of a very complex process in the european union with a contr various contributions coming from different cultures so at the time i was actually part of this process and i have a clear memory of the fact that there were strong differences between say italy and finland anyway he wrote after some years another book commenting the previous one i do not know to what extent you are familiar with this type of indicators but we are really addressing the most important aspect here in that these indicators are extremely interesting and i think that at european level we are still at the first level but they proposed the three indicators in three levels the primary secondary and the tertiary indicators i'm not going to talk long about this but they supported that it wasn't just enough to look at this so-called acronym arope for poverty and social exclusion so those at risk of poverty and social exclusion whereby indicators are the risk of poverty 50 income below the average of the country whereby distinguish that also by um by gender then persistence of poverty risk and other elements the persistence of the risk of poverty as well as the percentage of long-term unemployment or low literacy level or families without a house or dwelling well in the last few years it was considering the problem of housing which is never part of the european indicators there are the jobless or houseless but literacy as well as the dwelling conditions were considered part of those deprivations so it was a quite important work of a critical and self-critical nature i think for the european union overall it's been an important work an important contribution it is very important also for us as scholars i think the interview showed quite clearly something that made me love and admire tommy atkinson that is a combination of preciseness in looking for the most robust data and indicators so the most reliable ones while at the same time being fully aware that politics count counts so he was highly committed to highlighting this topic so this book ends with 15 different proposals on what to do to fight inequalities so he was a social democrat and he attracted a lot of criticism but i believe as much as he did that it is not true that that's the way things go and we can't do anything about them these are the laws these are things uh the result this this events are the result of political decisions or of lack of political decisions hence the scholar must take on the responsibility for carrying out very precise analysis well at the same time putting forward the political proposals not only economics but also politics matter thank you thank you for reminding us of the europism of tony atkinson so it was a real english man and very much convinced of the unification process in europe whom i had the honor to know now over to the worldwide dimension francisco ferreira is with us we're very honored to have you here you senior advisor advisor for in the head of research of the world bank so thank you for crossing the ocean for us to join us and uh and sadly that's my italian good evening everyone and sorry to continue in english but i'd like to thank andrea for organizing this session in honor of tony who was a really a remarkable scholar and a remarkable person and this is actually two things that tony was remarkable because he wasn't only a great scholar he was also a man of profound respect for everyone that he met and people always came across with that impression as as rudy today's i guess at the beginning um it's interesting that chiara started her talk talking about um inequality within the family then move to europe and now i'm going to talk about poverty in the world and in a sense that true is a testament to the breadth of tony's interests and abilities so i'm going to talk specifically about his work on global poverty measurement and even more in particular the effect it's had now on the world bank over the last two years i'll be brief i'll just introduce it talk a little bit about the commission on global poverty which is also known as the atkinson commission where both andrea and i were part of it and then that commission made a large number of recommendations 21 to be precise to the bank and there's no time to talk about all of them so i'll talk about two of them um this idea of global societal poverty and then something to do with multi-dimensional poverty in a global context which brings us to the topic of this session and involves some health components therefore linking it to the broader theme of the festival this year so there's tony uh actually here right there's tony wearing his badge from the the penultimate i guess two years ago a festival here and the quote of his that i have here uh i chose this it's from the introduction to one of his famous papers in econometric on the measurement of poverty i chose it because it shows something that i think is particularly important of in tony's legacy which is the ability to be rigorous and precise but at the same time understand that that doesn't imply a unique answer so he says there's likely to be a diversity of judgments affecting all aspects of measuring poverty and we should recognize this explicitly in the procedures we adopt tony was very cognizant and taught all of us really in the profession that the measurement of things like inequality and poverty inherently involves some amount of value judgment even if that value judgment is expressed mathematically in terms of the weights you place on different points along the distribution of income or choices you make about the poverty line and he insisted that we should look for robust ways of assessing changes or making other comparisons whether it be in inequality or in poverty and so interesting that he accepted in the last two years of his life to confront something that at first sight might appear to be the opposite of that which is the monitoring of global income poverty by the world bank where we very typically put things up like this which is just one measure for one poverty line telling you one number about the global poor now i'll argue that there is some value in it and i'll show you how this there was this marriage between tony's broad nuanced approach and what may appear to be this kind of single-minded pursuit of one number that we had at the bank so what we have here in this figure are the global head count of poverty we estimate at the world bank with respect to an extreme poverty line of a dollar ninety per person per day in 2011 ppps and you see this decline that he talked about in the video when he talked about this big convergence of china and india and other countries bringing down poverty well that's what he was talking about whereas over a third of the world lived under this very extreme poverty incidence only as long ago as 1990 by now that's down to a still unacceptable but much lower 11 and the numbers the absolute numbers of poor have fallen from 1.8 1.9 billion people to under 1 one billion people but tony would immediately caution us and did that behind this single numbers there was considerable complexity and some of that complexity was that even in that simple those simple lines that i put up there behind that there are really many many moving moving parts um many many ingredients um for example to make those estimates we have to have household surveys for lots of countries about 130 now and a number of surveys going back in each of those years and there are sampling and coverage issues in each of those surveys and each of those surveys ask questions about income or consumption in different ways so that it's difficult to compare first of all income with consumption but second even the different measures of income are consumption that are used to estimate standards of living in these different countries surveys are not taken at the same year so we need to use domestic price indices and whereas you may think that inflation is a simple thing to calculate and in italy or britain or the us there are inflation indices that we trust there are still debates about them but we typically trust them in many countries that we deal with the consumer price indices themselves are very problematic then there is the issue of how to compare the purchasing power of a dollar in malawi with switzerland where even the goods that are bought in malawi and switzerland are so different which lead to these purchasing power parity exchange rates and those purchasing power parity exchange rates have caused a lot of trouble each time the international comparison project goes out and collects these prices the world's rankings of income and so on change and they don't change only because the reality has changed they changed because the method underpinning these calculations has changed so there was a lot of trouble there and then there's the issue of how do you choose a poverty line that's suitable for the world a poverty line that might make sense again in madagascar or burkina faso but also in italy chile norway wherever so then because of all of these issues and because in particular of the fact that the purchasing power parity exchange rates had been so unstable that a number of us felt that we weren't on as solid ground as we thought we'd been uh kaushik baso who was the chief economist of the bank a couple of years ago and a number of other people there said look we need the best advice we can get from around the world to guide us on this process of monitoring global poverty in the future and of course we quickly converged on tony's name as the person who should lead that group and so a commission was convened with 24 people and that was asked to do two things provide advice on the monitoring of income poverty uh using the ppps and so on which is point a over there uh but then also uh took the opportunity to say maybe we should broaden the way we examine global poverty beyond simply that one number and so we asked for advice on complementary poverty measures to be tracked and made available and tony took that on when he accepted that task he was already ill the report was published in october 2016 so two to three months before he died and as andrea said although there was a group helping him he wrote the report single-handedly in in remarkable fashion and as i say the report is very detailed and makes lots of recommendations to the bank um 21 as i said here i just want to focus on these four which have two implications and and the first one is that um in addition to that global poverty head count that lines the two lines i showed you before the bank should now have more indicators complementary indicators including a multi-dimensional dashboard okay six that's 11. recommendation 16 says look we should introduce a societal head count measure what is that that's one that takes account of the fact that above some level the standard of living of the country in question starts mattering for the poverty line so maybe the poverty line shouldn't be just an absolute 1.90 everywhere maybe it should combine that an absolute floor with something that's a little more relative like say something like you have in the european union um and then that we the other two are that we should have a measurement of non-monetary poverty and a multi-dimensional poverty indicator so then let me spend just a couple of minutes on each of those two this idea of the global societal measure of poverty uh and something about multi-dimensionality so this is a picture of uh um a person and i'm not even sure whether it's a man or a woman by looking at it uh who lives in a santiago islam in in chile and who would certainly be considered a poor person in chile uh but but who may well live on more than a dollar ninety a day okay so actually it's almost certain that that her income i think it's a she that her income is higher than 1.90 a day and yet all chileans would probably regard her as poor so the question is is there a sense in which when we are counting the global poor she should be included or should she not it's actually not as easy a question as you may think you might argue well no maybe we should stick with the extreme poor the ones in uganda in in bangladesh in in malawi or wherever where they're really really below a dollar ninety a day um now the view that tony and francois burgundy and tony action francois bergyon took in in an early paper in 2000 and then a number of other people including martin rebellion and shaw chen at the bank and others thought was to say well maybe we should keep the extreme poverty as a lower bound on poverty but we should allow for the fact that this the standards of living in in as the standard of living in a country rises the concept of poverty in that country also rises and therefore there should be a line for the world which takes account of that and we went back to a data set that we used earlier to set the dollar a day line or the dollar 90 a day line which was this set of poverty lines you have here these are national poverty lines plotted against um income in the country in this case uh consumption per capita in the country or median here okay so this is these are actual poverty lines from very poor countries all the way to rich countries uh martin ravage who made this graph label this true because he liked to point out how politics matter in making decisions this is what the us thinks is the poverty line and this is what luxembourg thinks is the poverty line although they are more or less at the same level um of income but the fact is that whereas before to fix the dollar a day or the dollar 90 a day we looked only at the lines in the poorest countries which tended to be in this flat bit if you look at all countries you see that actually countries do define poverty quite differently so what we're going to do based on the work by some colleagues of mine dean jollif and aspen prizes we're now going to the vote as the world bank reports its poverty numbers for the world as a whole it will continue to emphasize the dollar 90 as the absolute extreme poverty but will also report um a societal global poverty measure where countries will be compared with a line that's going to be 190 up to a certain point but beyond that point it will be um one dollar plus half the median income in the country this is what um raval and chen call a weekly relative poverty line because there's a mix of relative and absolute line in there and of course that does make a difference so here are some estimates already it's a preview for uh festival goers in trento only of what the world bank will show next year uh so here is you know that decline that we saw before in the in the poverty with respect to a dollar ninety to the international poverty line um uh you know going uh all the way up here from around 40 to uh just around 10 percent and and this is the the um the weekly relative line now there are two lines there the solid one is without the minimum dollar ninety and and the other one the dashed one is the one with the dollar ninety as a floor so the dashed one is the one i'm really focusing on here and there's the number of poor now it's very interesting if you look at it so um for example whereas we've had this massive reduction in poverty to around ten percent um when you look at this morse demanding criteria that reduction is only to around thirty percent and the number of poor in the world have fallen much less fast in fact you might argue whether they've fallen at all because of population growth in a lot of those countries do we think this has not happened do we think that this progress is not real no that progress is real but it needs to be qualified by also looking at another measure and that is i think very true to tony's spirit um that one must look broadly at a number of different indicators so let me now turn uh uh in closing do i have five minutes or so yeah uh in closing to this idea of of global multi-dimensional poverty so this is a is a big debate um you know actually um if you think of two giants of poverty and inequality measurement both of whom have been here i think tony is one and the others are marty sen amartya was probably the one who emphasized mordo's idea of multi-dimensionality in part because he had this view of human objectives which was inherently multidimensional he thought of capabilities sets of beings and functionings as you well know where estonia was originally in his work more grounded in a welfarist perspective but even in a welfare's perspective there may be dimensions of well-being that you can't compare very well with income you can't value security personal security or security from domestic violence or even the quality of education that you get or whether you have access to water or electricity using prices as easily as you can between tables chairs clothes and food and so there may be two quite different arguments for why once one wants to look at a a number of different indicators of deprivation rather than just income and consumption although i am amongst those who believe income and consumption is fundamental to an understanding of poverty we feel that it can be complemented by other things and what's particularly important whether you take the more human rights or sanyan approach or a welfarist approach to this is that what matters a lot are the correlations so here's a picture that actually comes from that paper of atkinson and marlier that i think chiara was referring to or if not the one she was referring to a related one to that but it's clearly by tony and eric marie and others uh where they're looking at multi-dimensional poverty in europe or in certain countries in europe so that's the european 2020 target now the point is the point i want to make is that the importance of looking at multinational poverty is that two countries might have the same numbers in the yellow ball or the orange ball or the purple ball but different degrees of overlap that's what matters what matters is the interaction the correlation the association whether poverty is concentrated across dimensions in one group or not and so that's something that we're interested in but to do that is actually quite hard because whereas measuring poverty and income may be hard enough at least you know your the two steps of measuring poverty typically are thought of as identifying the poor and then aggregating some information about the poor now identifying the poor when you're only looking at income requires choosing one line the poverty line but here we have to a choose the dimensions then choose cutoffs in each dimension then choose how we're going to deal with all of those dimensions so you're deprived in three dimensions does that mean you're poor or do you need to be deprived in four dimensions do you need to be deprived just in any dimension or in all dimensions these are debates on the union intersection and so on approaches which andrea and our friend ralph abberger have summarized very nicely in a chapter in the handbook of income distribution there was another thing that tony and francois edited recently and then when it comes to aggregation the choice of measures can also be quite complicated you know in in income terms you have to worry about how much value you put to depth in poverty or how far you are from the poverty line but here in addition to depth you have breath across dimensions and are the dimensions complements or substitutes and do you weigh dimensions or not and it can become you know an incredibly complicated thing so here we're very much still in a work in progress at the world bank um we don't have numbers yet as we do for the global societal line that i'm showing you so i'm just giving you a little sense here a little preview of where our work is going what dimensions choice of dimensions well here are some dimensions we'd like to have we'd like to anchor everything on monetary poverty and that will make our measure quite different from that of the undp for example which does not have income or consumption poverty as one of the dimensions and in questions we can debate a lot about that but that's a difference we'll have we will have something on education we'd like to have something on health and nutrition something on access to utilities something on security and the way we're doing this is we're starting out with this right hand column here of what the ideal indicators might be and then we're seeing okay we don't have those idea indicators for all these countries so what can we do for a wide range of countries and what can we do for a smaller set of countries with richer data we don't have time to go into detail on that let me just give you some examples from the health and nutrition rules since health is the topic of this festival ideally we'd like to have information both on access to health inputs health both preventative and curative and individual measures of health that are health outcomes normed against healthy populations and we like to have similar things for nutrition for different age groups and genders things like bmi stunting and anemia for a narrow set of countries we can get close to that not perfect but we can get close to that with things like body mass index for adults stunting for children some information of on health care providers and so on but sadly when we look at the data centers we have for most developing countries that include consumption and income in them we do not we're not able to do as at the moment much on health for a wide set of countries so this these are the challenges that we're struggling with at the moment and we're likely to end up doing presenting something here and something in the middle column because we'd like very much to have health there but we cannot do it for a very large number of countries let me skip this just to say uh there are these additional issues of aggregation identification and aggregation and we have some some thoughts on that and we can talk about it if you have questions but instead i'll just conclude by saying i i work at the world bank i was as andrea said i was not as fortunate we both met tony first at lsc i was not as fortunate as andre andrea had tony as a teacher i was very happy with my my teacher the person who taught me those courses were nick stern and franco who were great but i was sorry that tony had just left for oxford when i started my phd but i was fortunate that he was my my examiner for my thesis although as i told julia earlier when we were talking probably his one big mistake was to allow me to get my phd and release me onto the world but it was a great pleasure for me to be able to work with him again in the last two years and i think he's made really important critical contributions to what we hope to do in terms of global poverty monitoring in the future both in terms of bringing greater conceptual depth and plurality and emphasizing the quality and importance of quality data which is something i didn't have much time to talk about but as andrea's initial quote about the statisticians in the solomon islands reveals tony is despite his great focus on theory and his knowledge of of of theory very very grounded on the importance of data as well and importantly forcing us to be humble and acknowledging the uncertainty and error around our estimates which is also something i didn't have a lot of time to talk about but is another one of his recommendations is to try and account for the variety of sampling and non-sampling errors that underpin our estimates so thank you very much thank you very much thank you well you really evidenced that tony was wonderful in selecting the right people and we know because you were brilliant in telling us about a huge amount of work in a few minutes and you were very clear thank you so much for that what is also interesting is that a person like tony was strongly influencing the work of the world bank which is a huge entity and i say that because often times we complain about huge organizations and we complain about their work but here the world bank is doing wonderful things better than the monetary fund and tony's influence was key in that respect we have a few minutes left for questions if any of course and unfortunately we will not be as good as tony would have been but only unfortunately is not here and so we will do our best thank you i actually attended tony atkinson's contribution here 12 years ago and uh you see i'm uh from trento and i have been a member of the provincial parliament for a long time and i also have a british husband anyway i have a question to professor saraceni you talked about various aspects and said that politics counts and very correctly you again stress that politics counts based on your knowledge not only of the book but also of the entire work of tony atkinson do you think that he also thought that politics counts do you think he thought and believed that economic and financial processes do not take place due to deterministic laws but due to projections of decisions which are decisive and which are made by institutions at local and national and european and international level which means that there is a major responsibility on the shoulders of those who make the decisions do you think that altogether and i'm specializing at pub in public health at the sapienza rome university i'm addressing the topic of inequalities or from a medical viewpoint and not so much a biomedical viewpoint but in terms of the analysis of the social health determinants what is very interesting is that this approach that also is developed in atkinson's book can be combined strongly with the topic of health and actually health and here i go back to the central topic of the festival so health as a topic could be interpreted not only in biomedical terms as an absence of disease but also using the who definition of health which includes the other dimensions and it health is also proxy in terms of the distribution of wealth and it is also an objective if we want to talk in general terms we can also interpret a number of phenomena and things and yet we have to set an objective and if politics counts then health should be the perspective adopted to interpret things in general i know that mine was an observation and not a question thank you francesco figari he's here he worked for a long period with tony atkinson well thinking back of the the last two works by tony atkinson including the last book on inequality where there we find clear policy uh in instruction so to say or indications and i admit i did not read all of the report on global poverty but i was offered a wonderful summary by professor ferreira so thinking about the global poverty and the work done within the framework of that commission what attention has been paid to the policies that tony so strongly believed in and do you think that those policies can have an impact in the fight against the global poverty thank you very much thank you francesco it seems that there are no additional questions so chiara would you like to start answering yes i would like to reformulate what you said i think that professor atkinson said that processes can be politically guided or directed when talking about the financialization of economy or the increase in income inequality he states states that this is the outcome of power relations on the one hand or absence of politics but at the same time he also said and he did so also in their interview when talking about the effects of technological development so he said in an optimistic way that we might have some concerns about technological development as stealing away jobs from human beings and especially at the lower levels of labor and yet we might also take a different perspective and political decision makers direct are made lighter in a way and they will not disappear in that case but they are improved so to say it is an open question and debate of course i was impressed by the fact that differently from many other economists actually acknowledged the important role of politics economic processes are not neutral in that respect to politics and actually many of the disasters that happened in terms of increase or in inequality for instance in also in developed countries and especially in developed countries which are the main topic of the book so with reference to that the real problem is the absence of politics and not so much to the fact that wrong political choices were made so the problem is the lack of political responsibility and that meant that power relations could have free room and because politics has disappeared and the strongest prevail of course and he addressed several topics from that perspective including monopolism with reference to health benefits the indicator of being in healthy conditions or not was he thought a very important indicator if i may i would like to add that in general as we also heard in the interview it is so that we can't understand how come that we can't accept that banks go bankrupt a while we accept unthinkable levels of unemployment so probably he would also agree with me when saying that there are unacceptable inequalities in health due to the lack of economic resources or the difficulty of gaining access to health care in a number of countries that is part of the inequality that he addressed and that he thought could be corrected by means of political decisions and i don't know whether i answered your question okay uh on on the question on policies from uh from francesco so tony was incredibly broad and incredibly brave to take on huge issues but he was not crazy and so he began the the report on poverty by saying we will deal exclusively with the issue of measurement in this work and not with the issue of of of policies which i think was very wise because the issue of measurement was itself just so gigantic in that context i could leave it there i will just add to that that of course we at the bank have as an obligation to think about policies and to summarize again very briefly what could be a huge long discussion we're doing that report that has the charts that i showed you to start with say that the discussion on policies to eliminate poverty should best be done at the national or even sub-national level obviously the policies that will help reduce poverty in the democratic republic of congo and in mongolia are bound to be quite different that said at a very general level we think that the things that have the common elements that successful countries that have reduced poverty share at a very broad level are sustainable broadly sustainable macroeconomic management well-functioning and inclusive labor markets which again can mean different things in different places um and a complementary role for the state including in the provision of safety nets so we think that there is no country that's too poor for safety nets we think social assistance and a role of the government in the provision of both goods and services but also transfers directly can assist in the reduction of poverty across the broad development range that sounds very general because at the level of all countries in the world you can't say much hope what that means in each particular country is what's really interesting and we don't have time for those if i may i'll just make a comment as well on the comment about health that was at the bottom and that is to say that this health inequalities unlike income income inequalities are typically measured in terms of one variable income and there is a measure of dispersion the genie or variance or mean logic health inequalities are typically measured in terms of two variables and in terms of a gradient right the famous socioeconomic gradients that michael marmot showed us and so on and so forth now those gradients are correlations that are interesting and revealing in themselves but what i personally think is even more interesting is that because they spend generations and because income poverty today may create bad income bad health for children today they are part of something that interests me a lot which is the reproduction of inequalities and inequality of opportunity so the links between health and income are part of that generation of inequality of opportunities that i think is the worst kind of inequality i like to say that um you know inequality of opportunity is the active ingredient of all inequalities is the really bad part of it so i think that nexus is very important in a number of ways as you said thanks thank you chico i don't see any more hands i would like two points i would like to highlight two points in connection with the role of politics first point is related to technology in the book concerning the inequalities amongst the 15 proposals put forward by tony the first one is related to the overall discussion understanding these social implications of the adoption technologies for example tony's idea was not to block technological progress but rather having an understanding of how such choices may have devastating consequences like for example the instruction of jobs and he says in an interview technology doesn't fall from heaven technology and innovation are a creation of uh maine so very often we talk about tony saying that he's a scholar and an expert in social inequalities but he was also a great economist he wrote his first paper with joe stiglitz concerning the evolution of technology and he developed the concept from a theoretical standpoint saying the technology develops alongside lines that are decided by human beings so books of economics often talk about a uniform universe and we can shift the frontier in a uniform manner no that's not right depending on the technology we have we may move in one or the other direction so tony was an economist in his view of the world that depended on a very strong economic perspective we were really so sorry that he was not awarded the nobel prize probably this was due more to his ideas they were not considered orthodox rather than from any other reason let me conclude by saying that the role of politics is very important is not just the role of our institutions and when tony was the president of the european economic association gave his speech the presidential address at the economists conference and his presidential address was published under the title of public economics and the economic public and he was concentrating on the public's economics italy that should provide the instruments to the economic public so to the citizens in order for them to understand and evaluate the political choices and he criticized economists saying that i think jay cold if j colt can explain the universe with some graphs without anything else why shouldn't economists be capable of explaining things utilizing very few graphs and telling us what they do and what the government decides decide to do so that citizens are aware of all this well he was the first one to utilize micro simulation models francesco worked on that for taxes and transfers tonight the first microsimulation model for the british system and with tony zappalandi went to the parliament with his computer to evaluate the proposal of the government in real time and show the implications in terms of income distribution effects on poverty and with the shadow minister shadow minister gordon brown who was pushing hard to get results because he had to go and discuss those figures with the conservative prime minister the citizens role is key and i would like to conclude this uh conversation thanking you very warm-heartedly for being with us uh i'd like to thank kiara karen for the beautiful interview he spent a lot of time to make it so rudy's been a great director and a great contributor to this session thank you for being with us until so late foreign foreign