"An indispensable reference for all researchers interested in the
measurement of social welfare. . ."
--François Bourguignon, Emeritus Professor at Paris School of Economics,
Former Chief Economist of the World Bank.
". . .a detailed, insightful, and pedagogical presentation of the
theoretical grounds of multidimensional well-being, inequality, and
poverty measurement. Any student, researcher, and practitioner
interested in the multidimensional approach should begin their journey
into such a fascinating theme with this wonderful book."
--François Maniquet, Professor, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium.
A Review of the Multidimensional Approaches to the Measurement of
Welfare, Inequality, and Poverty
Analyzing Multidimensional Well-Being: A Quantitative Approach offers
a comprehensive approach to the measurement of well-being that includes
characteristics such as income, health, literacy, and housing. The
author presents a systematic comparison of the alternative approaches to
the measurement of multidimensional welfare, inequality, poverty, and
vulnerability. The text contains real-life applications of some
multidimensional aggregations (most of which have been designed by
international organizations such as the United Nations
Development Program and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development) that help to judge the performance of a country in the
various dimensions of well-being.
The text offers an evaluation of how well a society is doing with
respect to achievements of all the individuals in the dimensions
considered and clearly investigates how achievements in the dimensions
can be evaluated from different perspectives. The author includes a
detailed scrutiny of alternative techniques for setting weights to
individual dimensional metrics and offers an extensive analysis into
both the descriptive and welfare theoretical approaches to the concerned
multi-attribute measurement and related issues. This important resource:
- Contains a synthesis of multidimensional welfare, inequality,
poverty, and vulnerability analysis
- Examines aggregations of achievement levels in the concerned
dimensions of well-being from various standpoints
- Shows how to measure poverty using panel data instead of restricting
attention to a single period and when we have imprecise information on
dimensional achievements
- Argues that multidimensional analysis is intrinsically different from
marginal distributions-based analysis
Written for students, teachers, researchers, and scholars, Analyzing
Multidimensional Well-Being: A Quantitative Approach puts the focus on
various approaches to the measurementof the many aspects of well-being
and quality of life.
Satya R. Chakravarty is a Professor of Economics at the Indian
Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. He is an Editor of Social Choice
and Welfare and a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Economic
Inequality.
