Methodological Choices Encountered in the Construction of Composite Indices of Economic and Social Well-Being

Julia Salzman

No 2004-05, CSLS Research Reports from Centre for the Study of Living Standards

Abstract: In recent year a large number of composite indexes of economic and social well-being have been developed (Hagerty et. al., 2001). Unfortunately, the methodological issues associated with index construction have often been neglected or inadequately treated by index developers. The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the methodological choices involved in the construction of indexes of economic and social well-being and the implications of the choices for the properties of the index. Building on a recent paper by Booysen (2002) and work done by the United National Development Program (e.g. Anand and Sen, 1994), the paper addresses issues related to the choice of functional form of variables, scaling issues, the aggregation operations, weighting schemes, and the choice between single and complementary composite indexes. A detailed typology of the issues addressed in the paper accompanies this abstract. The paper concludes with a list of recommendations for best-practice methodologies for composite index construction.

Keywords: composite indices; well-being measurement; Index of Economic Well-Being; methodology; weighting; aggregation; Human Development Index; scaling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://csls.ca/research/methodological-choices-en ... d-social-well-being/ (text/html)
https://csls.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/csls2004-05-1.pdf (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:sls:resrep:0405

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.csls.ca

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSLS Research Reports from Centre for the Study of Living Standards 170 Laurier Ave. W, Suite 604, Ottawa, ON K1P 5V5. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CSLS ().