Mortality and poverty measurement

Benoit Decerf

Chapter 53 in Research Handbook on Measuring Poverty and Deprivation, 2023, pp 572-580 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter surveys the small branch of literature inside welfare economics that studies normative indicators combining poverty and mortality. A distinction is made between two reasons for constructing such indicators. The first reason is to perform multidimensional well-being comparisons. For this purpose, mortality has (negative) intrinsic value and the key question relates to the trade-off that the indicator makes between poverty and mortality. The second reason is to investigate the instrumental role that selective mortality– the fact that the poor tend to die earlier – has on the evolution of poverty measures. Then, the key question is how to define the counterfactual situation against which the instrumental impact of mortality is assessed. The main message of this survey is that some of the indicators proposed recently indicators may be useful in order to express the trade-off between the quality and quantity of life in a transparent way.

Keywords: Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Geography; Research Methods; Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781800883451/9781800883451.00070.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:20574_53

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().