Poverty, understood in a broad sense, includes from violence to malnutrition, from analphabetism to spleen, from depression to consumerism; all these are manifestations of poverty: of the spirit, of the biological, social, political, of the intelligence, blights of the human development potential. In consequence, studying poverty must considerate all the aspects of life the individual interacts with. A man with a healthy development has to dispose of the interior and material resources in order to fulfill his biological, socio-cultural and affective needs. The economic factor disposable for the individual will allow him the optimization of the functioning of the others components of human life. Its role is that of contributing to the freedom of action for satisfying the human development needs, being an instrumentative role. Both the study of poverty as an actual state of fact and the one of the policies for eradicating poverty have to take into consideration all the dimensions of human poverty, if they want to be successful. From the point of view of the global efforts made in this direction and the strong interdependences that characterize the global society of the 21st century, poverty becomes an economic process of first importance for the evolution of the global society. How poverty looks today, in which areas it is more visible, which are some of its causes and how eradicating poverty policies could be improved are one of the aspects presented in this paper.