thus poverty measurement is fundamental for monitoring public policies and since these initiatives do not just provide monetary transfers but also educational health labour and social protection services the monetary indicators provide insufficient information for capturing the impact of policies for example it has been pointed out that procedures for adding information may result in information losses and that the choice of an aggregation mechanism for handling information in a system of indicators may be arbitrary maurizio however a system of indicators does not solve the problem of identification that is of selecting those that may be classified as poor and those that may not moreover a synthetic index facilitates the joint analysis of shortcomings allowing for a comprehensive system santos fosters communication by summing up a high number of dimensions and consequently facilitates decisionmaking maurizio santos