a first option is to consider a person as poor if he or she falls below the poverty line in at least one dimension bourguignon and chakravarty this approach is called the union approach but it has been criticized on the grounds that it may identify as poor some persons who are not truly poor an alternative to the union approach is the intersection approach whereby a person is defined as poor if he or she falls below the poverty threshold in all dimensions but this may fail to identify individuals suffering from extensive deprivation in certain dimensions