Global lifespan and welfare inequality over the last five decades from a prioritarian perspective

Shaun Costa ()
Additional contact information
Shaun Costa: Paris School of Economics

Social Choice and Welfare, 2025, vol. 65, issue 2, No 9, 487-512

Abstract: Abstract Recent assessments of global welfare inequality utilise measures that combine country-level outcomes in consumption and life expectancy (or average lifespan). However, this perspective remains blind to the fact that two countries may have the same life expectancy but very different underlying distributions of lifespan. In this paper, I examine global welfare inequality over the last five decades using a preference-based measure, the equivalent consumption, which accounts for these within-country differences. I find that the evolution of inequality over time is very sensitive to the underlying normative choices within the measure. More specifically, downward trends in global welfare inequality are reversed when greater priority is given to to those with the shortest lifespans.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00355-024-01579-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:65:y:2025:i:2:d:10.1007_s00355-024-01579-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-024-01579-2

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().