Integrating Mortality into Poverty Measurement through the Poverty Adjusted Life Expectancy Index

• Tác giả: Jean-Marie Baland
• Ngôn ngữ: eng
• Ký hiệu phân loại: 614.13 Forensic toxicology
• Thông tin xuất bản: World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022
• Bộ sưu tập: Tài liệu truy cập mở
• ID: 299697
• Chủ đề: 1. HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX; 2. MORTALITY; 3. MULTIDIMENSIONAL POVERTY; 4. POVERTY; 5. WELL-BEING INDEX

Tóm tắt

Poverty measures typically do not account for mortality, resulting in counter-intuitive evaluations. The reason is that they (i) suffer from a mortality paradox and (ii) do not attribute intrinsic value to the lifespan. The paper proposes the first poverty index that always attributes a positive value to lifespan and does not suffer from the mortality paradox. This index, called the poverty-adjusted life expectancy, follows an expected lifecycle utility approach a la Harsanyi and is based on a single normative parameter that transparently captures the trade-off between poverty and mortality. This indicator can be straightforwardly generalized to account for unequal lifespans. Empirically, we show that accounting for mortality substantially changes cross-country comparisons and trends. The paper also quantifies the fraction of these comparisons that are robust to the choice of the normative parameter.