Poverty is still a big economic and social problem of almost every country. Therefore, it is very important to precisely define, identify and measure this phenomenon in order to be able to reduce poverty to a socially tolerable level. In the earliest approaches to measuring poverty, it was defined as the economic inability to meet basic needs and the minimum of living standards. However, modern methods of poverty analysis require a multidimensional approach to its measurement. In this sense, it includes many non-material dimensions of life, social and psychological dimensions of poverty and various forms of their manifestations. Analysing poverty based on only one, mainly monetary dimension, either income or consumption, has long been overcome. In addition to the level of income or consumption, various indicators can also indicate economic deprivation: housing quality indicators and possession of durable goods, share of a specific type of consumption in the total consumption, etc. As there is no universally accepted (only one) definition of poverty, there is no universal definition of multiple poverty either.
Poverty in Bosnia and Herzegovina was officially measured by using various definitions and poverty lines, but almost all of them were of the one-dimensional nature since only consumption expenditure was used as a monetary measure. To date, the official statistics in Bosnia and Herzegovina have not calculated multidimensional poverty indices and this issue was only a subject of rare academic researches.
The aim of this paper is to present one approach for measuring multidimensional poverty in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to calculate multidimensional poverty indices at national and subnational (entity) levels and to give more complete poverty picture in the country by presenting the dynamics of one-dimensional and multidimensional poverty indices during the period from 2004 to 2022.