Analyzing Multidimensional Well-Being

Book description

“An indispensable reference for all researchers interested in the measurement of social  welfare. . .”

—François Bourguignon, Emeritus Professor at Paris School of Economics, Former Chief Economist of the World Bank.

 

“. . .a detailed, insightful, and pedagogical presentation of the theoretical grounds of multidimensional well-being, inequality, and poverty measurement. Any student, researcher, and practitioner interested in the multidimensional approach should begin their journey into such a fascinating theme with this wonderful book.”

—François Maniquet, Professor, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium.

A Review of the Multidimensional Approaches to the Measurement of Welfare, Inequality, and Poverty

Analyzing Multidimensional Well-Being: A Quantitative Approach offers a comprehensive approach to the measurement of well-being that includes characteristics such as income, health, literacy, and housing. The author presents a systematic comparison of the alternative approaches to the measurement of multidimensional welfare, inequality, poverty, and vulnerability. The text contains real-life applications of some multidimensional aggregations (most of which have been designed by international organizations such as the United Nations

Development Program and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) that help to judge the performance of a country in the various dimensions of well-being.

The text offers an evaluation of how well a society is doing with respect to achievements of all the individuals in the dimensions considered and clearly investigates how achievements in the dimensions can be evaluated from different perspectives. The author includes a detailed scrutiny of alternative techniques for setting weights to individual dimensional metrics and offers an extensive analysis into both the descriptive and welfare theoretical approaches to the concerned multi-attribute measurement and related issues. This important resource:

• Contains a synthesis of multidimensional welfare, inequality, poverty, and vulnerability analysis

• Examines aggregations of achievement levels in the concerned dimensions of well-being from various standpoints

• Shows how to measure poverty using panel data instead of restricting attention to a single period and when we have imprecise information on dimensional achievements

• Argues that multidimensional analysis is intrinsically different from marginal distributions-based analysis

Written for students, teachers, researchers, and scholars, Analyzing Multidimensional Well-Being: A Quantitative Approach puts the focus on various approaches to the measurementof the many aspects of well-being and quality of life.

Satya R. Chakravarty is a Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. He is an Editor of Social Choice and Welfare and a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Economic Inequality.

Table of contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright
  3. Dedication
  4. Preface
  5. Endorsements
  6. Chapter 1: Well-Being as a Multidimensional Phenomenon
    1. 1.1 Introduction
    2. 1.2 Income as a Dimension of Well-Being and Some Related Aggregations
    3. 1.3 Scales of Measurement: A Brief Exposition
    4. 1.4 Preliminaries for Multidimensional Welfare Analysis
    5. 1.5 The Dashboard Approach and Weights on Dimensional Metrics in a Composite Index
    6. 1.6 Multidimensional Welfare Function Axioms
    7. 1.7 Multidimensional Welfare Functions
    8. 1.8 Concluding Remarks
    9. References
  7. Chapter 2: An Overview of Multidimensional Economic Inequality
    1. 2.1 Introduction
    2. 2.2 A Review of One-Dimensional Measurement
    3. 2.3 Multidimensional Inequality Indices
    4. 2.4 Concluding Remarks
    5. References
  8. Chapter 3: A Synthesis of Multidimensional Poverty
    1. 3.1 Introduction
    2. 3.2 A Brief Review of One-Dimensional Analysis
    3. 3.3 Preliminaries for Multidimensional Poverty Analysis
    4. 3.4 Identification of the Poor and Deprivation Counting
    5. 3.5 Axioms for a Multidimensional Poverty Metric
    6. 3.6 Multidimensional Poverty Measurement
    7. 3.7 Multidimensional Poverty Orderings
    8. 3.8 Dimensions of Well-Being with Ordinal Significance and Multidimensional Poverty
    9. 3.9 Orderings Based on Deprivations Counts
    10. 3.10 Multidimensional Material Deprivation
    11. 3.11 Concluding Remarks
    12. References
  9. Chapter 4: Fuzzy Set Approaches to the Measurement of Multidimensional Poverty
    1. 4.1 Introduction
    2. 4.2 Fuzzy Membership Function
    3. 4.3 Axioms for a Fuzzy Multidimensional Poverty Index
    4. 4.4 Fuzzy Multidimensional Poverty Indices
    5. 4.5 Fuzzy Poverty Orderings
    6. 4.6 Concluding Remarks
    7. References
  10. Chapter 5: Poverty and Time: A Multidimensional Appraisal
    1. 5.1 Introduction
    2. 5.2 Preliminaries
    3. 5.3 The Block Approach
    4. 5.4 An Exploration of the Counting Approaches to Multidimensional Intertemporal Deprivations
    5. 5.5 The Multidimensional Duration Approach
    6. 5.6 Intertemporal Poverty Orderings
    7. 5.7 Concluding Remarks
    8. References
  11. Chapter 6: Vulnerability to Poverty: A Multidimensional Evaluation
    1. 6.1 Introduction
    2. 6.2 A Review of One-Dimensional Measurement
    3. 6.3 Multidimensional Representation of Vulnerability to Poverty: An Axiomatic Investigation
    4. 6.4 Concluding Remarks
    5. References
  12. Chapter 7: An Exploration of Some Composite and Individualistic Indices
    1. 7.1 Introduction
    2. 7.2 Human Development Index
    3. 7.3 Human Poverty Index
    4. 7.4 Gender Inequality Index
    5. 7.5 Better Life Index
    6. 7.6 Active Citizenship Composite Index
    7. 7.7 Measuring Human Opportunity: A Counting Approach
    8. 7.8 Assessment of Progress toward Achievements in Millennium Development Goals
    9. 7.9 Air Quality Index
    10. 7.10 Concluding Remarks
    11. References
  13. Index
  14. End User License Agreement

Product information

  • Title: Analyzing Multidimensional Well-Being
  • Author(s): Satya R. Chakravarty
  • Release date: November 2017
  • Publisher(s): Wiley
  • ISBN: 9781119256908