A transparent index of well being accounting for mortality: Poverty Adjusted Life Expectancy

Jean-Marie Baland, Guilhem Cassan and Benoit Decerf

No 18058, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Poverty and mortality are the two major sources of well-being losses. We propose new summary indicators of well-being that account for mortality while being (i) conceptually sound, (ii) easily interpretable and implementable and (iii) sensitive to the distribution of well-being. Our main indicator is the poverty-adjusted life expectancy index. Following the expected life-cycle utility approach a la Harsanyi, it is based on a single normative parameter that transparently captures the trade-off between poverty and mortality. Empirically, we compare countries over time and focus on these situations in which mortality is in conflict with poverty. Once we assume that being poor is (at least weakly) preferable to being dead, we find that about a third of these conflicting comparisons can be unambiguously ranked by the poverty-adjusted life expectancy index. Finally, this indicator naturally defines a new and simple index of multidimensional poverty, the expected deprivation index, which also accounts for unequal lifespans.

Keywords: Human development index; Poverty; Mortality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I32 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP18058 (application/pdf)

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:cpr:ceprdp:18058

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP18058

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().