Integrating Mortality into Poverty Measurement through the Poverty Adjusted Life Expectancy Index
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.
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper biblioteca |
| Language: | English English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2022-07
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| Subjects: | WELL-BEING INDEX, HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX, MULTIDIMENSIONAL POVERTY, POVERTY, MORTALITY, POVERTY-ADJUSTED LIFE EXPECTANCY INDEX, COUNTRY COMPARISON, |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099826507292238069/IDU0dcf0c5150431e048e30af2b01041f1ae62d3 https://hdl.handle.net/10986/37790 |
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