Going Beyond GDP with a Parsimonious Indicator: Inequality-Adjusted Healthy Lifetime Income

David E. Bloom (), Victoria Y. Fan (), Vadim Kufenko, Osondu Ogbuoji (), Klaus Prettner and Gavin Yamey ()
Additional contact information
David E. Bloom: Harvard School of Public Health
Victoria Y. Fan: University of Hawaii at Manoa
Osondu Ogbuoji: Duke University
Gavin Yamey: Duke University

No 12963, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Per capita GDP has limited use as a well-being indicator because it does not capture many dimensions that imply a "good life," such as health and equality of opportunity. However, per capita GDP has the virtues of easy interpretation and can be calculated with manageable data requirements. Against this backdrop, a need exists for a measure of well-being that preserves the advantages of per capita GDP, but also includes health and equality. We propose a new parsimonious indicator to fill this gap and calculate it for 149 countries.

Keywords: beyond GDP; well-being; health; inequality; human development; lifetime income (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 E01 I15 I31 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2020-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap, nep-hea and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Going beyond GDP with a parsimonious indicator: inequality-adjusted healthy lifetime income (2021)
Working Paper: Going beyond GDP with a parsimonious indicator: Inequality-adjusted healthy lifetime income (2020)
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