Copula-based measurement of dependence between dimensions of well-being

Koen Decancq

Working Papers of Department of Economics, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Economics, Leuven

Abstract: Well-being consists of many dimensions such as income, health and education. A society exhibits greater dependence between its dimensions of well-being when the positions of the individuals in the different dimensions are more aligned or correlated. Differences in dependence may lead to very different societies, even when the dimension-wise distributions are identical. I propose to use a copula-based framework to order societies with respect to their dependence. A class of measures of dependence is derived to which the multidimensional rank correlation coefficient belongs. I illustrate the usefulness of the approach by showing that Russian dependence between three dimensions of well-being has increased significantly between 1995 and 2003. Unfortunately, the aspect of dependence is missed by all composite well-being measures based on dimension-specific summary statistics such as the popular Human Development Index (HDI).

Keywords: copula; complex inequality; concordance; HDI; multidimensional inequality; Russia; well-being. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 I31 O50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis and nep-hap
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/253173/1/DPS0924.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Copula-based measurement of dependence between dimensions of well-being (2014)
Working Paper: Copula-based measurement of dependence between dimensions of well-being (2014)
Working Paper: Copula-based measurement of dependence between dimensions of well-being (2014)
Working Paper: Copula-based Measurement of Dependence Between Dimensions of Well-being (2009)
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:ete:ceswps:ces09.24

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Department of Economics, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Economics, Leuven
Bibliographic data for series maintained by library EBIB ().