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
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