The Median Is the Message: A Good-Enough Measure of Material Well-Being and Shared Development Progress

Nancy Birdsall ()
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Christian Johannes Meyer and Nancy Birdsall

No 351, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: We argue that survey-based median household consumption expenditure (or income) per capita be incorporated into standard development indicators, as a simple, robust, and durable indicator of typical individual material well-being in a country. Using household survey data available for low- and middle-income countries from the World Bank’s PovcalNet tool, we show that as a measure of income-related well-being, it is far superior to the commonly used GDP per capita as well as survey-based measures at the mean. We also argue that survey-based median measures are “distributionaware”, i.e. when used as the denominator of various widely available indicators such as mean consumption expenditure per capita they provide a “good-enough” indicator of consumption (or income) inequality. Finally, as a post-2015 indicator of progress at the country-level in promoting shared development and reducing inequality, we propose that the rate of increase in median consumption per capita after taxes and transfers exceed the rate of increase in average consumption in the same period.

Keywords: welfare measure; median; consumption; inequality; distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 H22 I32 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2014-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-hap, nep-ltv and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/median-me ... t-progress_final.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: The Median is the Message: A Good Enough Measure of Material Wellbeing and Shared Development Progress (2015)
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:cgd:wpaper:351

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publications Manager ().